Matt Katz covers Gov. Chris Christie for WNYC public radio and NPR and is the author of American Governor: Chris Christie’s Bridge to Redemption.



At 10:20 p.m. last Tuesday, Chris Christie walked out into a ballroom at the Radisson in Nashua, New Hampshire, where a medium-sized and mildly enthused crowd of supporters had been milling around for a couple of hours. They were enjoying a cash bar and '80s music from the loudspeakers—including two renditions of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the Journey song that culminated the series finale of “The Sopranos.”

I looked at Christie, the bombastic New Jersey governor often compared in likeness and style to Tony Soprano, as he walked on stage with his wife and four kids. I had been looking at him from across a room for five years and two weeks.


I could tell. It was all over.

“All right,” he began. “Good evening.” He wasn’t smiling. He lacked any of the joyous energy that crowds, cheers and cameras normally engender in him.

I was standing on camera risers in the back of the room. I didn’t have to jockey past too much equipment; there was, tellingly, plenty of space, unusual for someone who has long attracted outsized media attention.

Nine minutes into his remarks Christie announced the bombshell we were waiting for: After coming in a humiliating sixth place, he had canceled his trip to the next state on the primary calendar, South Carolina, and would instead go home to New Jersey to reassess his presidential candidacy. Eighteen hours later, with a short missive on Facebook, he made it official: His run was ending.

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. Before the era of front-runner Donald Trump, Christie was the one sucking up the oxygen in the proverbial room—nationally, where he long enjoyed outsized media attention, and particularly in New Jersey, where government, politics and media revolved around him.

Christie’s larger-than-life power and personality have dictated my day-to-day since January 2011, when I first started covering him. That's a third of my journalism career. For the past two years, I reported on him on the radio and then wrote about him off-hours for my book on his life and career. In the middle of the night, if my son woke up crying, I’d be startled out of a dream and come to realize: Chris Christie was in my dream. I wasn’t dreaming about him. He’d just kind of be standing there, looming in the background.

But Christie is no longer standing. In what seems like a flash, he’s gone from GOP darling to all but irrelevant in the national political conversation. “It’s both the magic and the mystery of politics that you never quite know when which is going to happen even when you think you do,” Christie told the crowd in Nashua on the final night of his campaign. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

As he spoke, I put the Twitter machine down for a few moments and just watched him from the back of the room, the perch from which I had covered him hundreds of times, in several states. The politician who left that stage was a different man. As the chairs were folded, I went back to my laptop at the back of the room to write my dispatch, and the reporter sitting next to me handed me an airplane bottle of Glenlivet 12. Don’t mind if I do. I needed a taste, and not just because it had been a long day.

***

For six years, Christie has been the focus of every political reporter in New Jersey. Aside from the Democratic bosses and legislators who alternately served as his frenemies and sidekicks, his has been the political story in New Jersey most worth telling—and that includes the saga of the state’s senior U.S. senator, now indicted. His presidential pre-candidacy and candidacy were the North Star for New Jersey political journalism, the text or subtext to every Christie story. I referred to Christie as a “possible future presidential candidate” more times than I’d like to remember.

Christie first decided to be president in second grade, when he told a friend’s mother of his plans as he lowered the American flag outside of school. He was president of his class each year of high school and then student-body president in college.

In 2010, Christie’s first year as governor, he was already deflecting regular questions about his presidential plans as he dragged his state-funded security detail across the country to campaign for Republicans. He was already doing national TV and magazine interviews. He was already, as far as the press and his political opponents were concerned, running for president. “What is this governor doing to get his house in order?” asked New Jersey Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney before Christie even marked his first anniversary as governor. “He’s running for higher office.”

In a state that has what is considered the most powerful governorship, by virtue of the New Jersey constitution, every Christie utterance and policy decision of his first term was viewed through the lens of a candidacy that didn’t exist. Democrats said his presidential ambitions trumped his duty as governor time and again, from his increasingly frequent vetoes of gun control measures to his steadfast refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy to his widely reported rejection of a ban on tiny crates for pregnant pigs.

Unlike other presidential candidates, Christie had a cast of reporters from about a half-dozen news organizations who followed his every move around the country before his candidacy became official. We tagged along as he campaigned for Republican congressional candidates, fundraised for the Republican Governors Association and laid the groundwork for his own national run. I was on the Christie beat for two news organizations, first for the Philadelphia Inquirer and then WNYC public radio. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News had reporters on Christie full-time for most of his six years in office.

By contrast, the senators running for president don’t have a scrum of reporters who cover them exclusively—let alone a podcast dedicated to them (our very own Christie Tracker podcast at WNYC). Bush hasn’t had a reporter devoted to him in years, and Gov. John Kasich’s coverage from Ohio doesn’t come close to the New York media operation centered around Christie.

There are even two biographies about Christie written by reporters who cover him. I wrote the second. It published January 19. For 22 days, my book was about a presidential candidate. Now, “American Governor: Chris Christie’s Bridge to Redemption” is about a politician’s spectacular rise and the mind-boggling Bridgegate scandal that led to his demise.

After Christie’s New Hampshire loss, a few Christie reporters gathered back in my hotel room until the small hours of the next morning, drinking scotch, laughing about life on the campaign trail and complaining about Christie’s notoriously difficult press handlers. But we all agreed that there was something sad about it all being over, about the shocking collapse of a guy whom every reporter more famous than us kept saying has the most natural political talent in America. He finished sixth! In a state where he had spent more time than anyone and more money per voter than all but one candidate.

My hotel room felt like an Irish wake—not for Christie, but for the end of the political entertainment that we had chronicled. Christie as a public figure was far more multifaceted than Trump, the other political entertainer who upstaged him. Christie is prone to outrageous statements, but he also has an emotional range that surprises and confounds.

We had feuded. He once dropped an f-bomb threatening to kick me out of his office after I asked him too many questions about the lane-closures scandal. He cut reporters off in the middle of questions, scolded us for being too negative, sarcastically deflected questions, kept public documents secret and smack-talked, constantly. Campaigning in New Hampshire a few weeks ago, he told a patron at a diner to be careful about NJTV reporter David Cruz. “He’s from New Jersey, he’s very, very, untrustworthy,” Christie said. “Don’t leave the tip on the table while he’s around, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

Reporters were his comic foil. That brash style was part of what made him such an effective politician, what made voters fall for him after a well-told anecdote, what made us excited to cover him as he ran for president.

It was also what made us think, even after Bridgegate broke in January 2014, that he’d still have a chance.

But in the end, Christie’s rotating rationale for his candidacy—he was best positioned to “prosecute the case” against Hillary Clinton, he had the most experience going after terrorists, he saved New Jersey from fiscal collapse, he was always “telling it like it is”—failed to get much traction beyond us, the band of reporters who catalogued his every utterance. Maybe the tough Jersey-guy thing in the wake of the Bridgegate political retaliation scheme didn’t seem cute anymore. Maybe, after toying with a run in 2011, he just wasn’t new enough for the American people anymore.

We batted around all of these hypotheses in the hotel room. What we agreed on is that he’s now a tragic figure, as political tragedies go.

Christie returned to Trenton this week to deliver a budget address and begin to rebuild his legacy. He will try to cross off one or two items on his policy to-do list, and could cement his place in history by saving the nearly bankrupt public-employee pension fund. To get anything done he will have to use his considerable political skills to navigate around a half-dozen Democratic opponents jockeying to replace him as governor in a race that has already effectively begun. For old-times sake, he may try to shiv some old political enemies, which could be fun to watch. (And with some time on his hands, despite his vow not to read it, maybe he’ll sit back in his easy chair at the governor’s mansion and read my book about him.)

Christie could hope a President Bush, Kasich or Trump appoints him attorney general—if Bridgegate is over and done with by then, and if no other close Christie associates find themselves indicted. Then there’s always 2020, when he could try to challenge a President Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Or maybe politics is over for him. He could leave the statehouse when his term ends and walk into Fox News or MSNBC for a TV gig. He could become a political consultant, lobbyist or chairman of the Republican National Committee. And I think he’d love a highly paid power post as the commissioner of the NFL or Major League Baseball.

More importantly! What becomes of us, the Trenton reporters who enjoyed a modicum of notoriety covering a nationally prominent politician? In the days afterward, I got condolence notes on Twitter. People bemoaned that I’d have to return to Trenton. They joked that Christie dropped out to hurt my book sales.

I’ll be just fine, thank you. I’ll keep covering the governor. I have books to sell! But I’ll regret not seeing some more of that political magic that Christie referred to, like at the last town hall meeting he held in New Hampshire, 24 hours before his defeat, when a father and daughter who had previously told me they were adamantly anti-Christie came running up to me.

“I connected with Christie like I have with no other political candidate in my life,” the daughter told me. “He made me laugh, he made me cry. ... I felt like I was talking to my father. I felt that much of a connection with this man. And this is crazy! Like, the fact that I'm saying this right now—I’m surprising myself. … Hands down: Love this guy.”

The New Jersey press corps doesn’t love him. But we will undoubtedly miss having him around as a future possible presidential candidate.