Matt Katz covers Gov. Christie for WNYC and New Jersey Public Radio, and writes The Christie Tracker blog. His book about Christie is to be published next year by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.

“SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!” Th is was Chris Christie’s response to a man in a pin-stripe suit who interrupted his speech at the Jersey Shore on the second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy last month. The resulting Christie YouTube Video of The Moment had barely registered its 10,000th view before Christie’s words were etched on his political gravestone.

Democratic gravediggers included President Obama alum David Axelrod, who referenced “The Sopranos” and called the incident the “fatal flaw of Chris Christie’s presidential campaign.” Howard Dean, who knows a little something about screaming your way into premature political death, declared: “This guy is never going to be president, ever.”


The rivals on the right were more gentlemanly but sounded passive-aggressive as they spoke of their Southern sensibilities being rattled. “I grew up in the South. And we’re ‘yes, ma’am, and ‘no, sir,’ and a little bit more polite,” Sen. Rand Paul said. He referenced a “resurgence of people who want a little more civility and discourse” in politics. What evidence he had of that resurgence, he did not say.

If this is how Democrats and GOP primary opponents think they can beat Christie in 2016, they may want to sit down and shut up. Beware of trying to hang Christie by his mouth; it’s gonna be tougher than that.

Let’s first dispense with this idea that he’s somehow an out-of-control hothead. My time covering him for four years indicates that he controls almost every room, almost every situation—and almost always, himself. He can make crowds roar with laughter and go searching in their purses for tissues, all in the same speech. He can decide whether to yell back or ignore. Most of the time, I believe he knows exactly what he’s doing when he does it. As Christie likes to say: “I have more than one club in the bag.”

If Christie was really enslaved to his emotions, wouldn’t he have yelled at a reporter or two during the epic 108-minute mea culpa press conference he held in January the wake of the Bridgegate scandal? Instead, when a reporter that day repeated a question I had already asked—a violation of Christie press conference protocol which always garners a sharp, raised-voice retort—Christie calmly repeated the answer. He didn’t start talking smack again to us in the Trenton press corps until March.

Christie did seem angry when I watched him yell at that Jersey Shore interrupter a few weeks ago. Saying things like “take your jacket off” and “buddy” and “any time you like” certainly gave the whole exchange a bar fight sort of feel. So let’s say, then, that the governor is prone to unnecessary displays of anger—at least compared to, say, a Mitt Romney. But if that’s the case, the reality is we have no evidence to indicate that the electorate has a problem with this. After all, every time Christie takes down a reporter or a constituent in front of a crowd, that very same crowd backs him up with applause and cheers. Every time. They love these moments. After four years of him calling people “idiots” and “numbnuts,” Blue New Jersey elected him with wide margins.

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The argument goes that sure, Jersey loves these moments, but the rest of the country is classier. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested Christie take anger management classes because his yelling is “not going to work in New Hampshire, it’s not going to work in Iowa, it’s not going to work in South Carolina, it’s not going to work in the early primary states.”

Except it can work everywhere, and has worked everywhere. When Christie rallied with Mitt Romney in New Hampshire before the 2012 primaries, the heartiest applause of the night came when Christie told two female hecklers: “Something may go down tonight, but it ain't going to be jobs, sweetheart!” I was back in New Hampshire this month, on the day before the midterms. A woman in a parking lot in New London ran up to tell him she loved the way he put down reporters. In Salem, a woman told me that she didn’t always agree with Christie but his verbal takedowns indicated he had backbone—something lacking, in her view, in the White House. Both are independent voters; both said they would vote for him for president.

Just like at his events in New Jersey, on a presidential campaign Christie would surround himself with stacked crowds of partisans. That doesn’t mean he won’t get hecklers, it just means he will have friends to shout down those hecklers. I have no idea how Rand Paul will handle hecklers (I do remember he skulked away from a DREAM Act supporter), but I do know that Christie will call them idiots and look as if he’s going to fight them. Then they will be hauled away by people with earpieces, and the crowd will cheer, and Christie will continue on, more fired-up and compelling than he was when he first walked into the room. Witnesses will leave with smiles, telling reporters how thrilling it was to see, live in real-time, one of Christie’s future YouTube moments.

No, as much as national pundits like to bemoan Christie’s demeanor and as much as events like Bridgegate have underscored Christie’s reputation as a bully and a back-room brawler, his biggest campaign trail albatross is a more fundamental challenge—one he can’t fix with a smart made-for-YouTube put-down. Chris Christie’s greatest challenge as he contemplates moving onto the national stage is that his own state looks to be in rough shape.

What doesn’t play well on YouTube? As many as 10,000 people unemployed because of the closure, in a matter of months, of at least a third of the casinos in Atlantic City. What doesn’t play well on YouTube? The second worst credit rating among states in the nation. What doesn’t play well on YouTube? Unlike the nation as a whole, which has more than recovered the jobs it lost during the recession, New Jersey has yet to recover half of its lost jobs. Christie once declared a “New Jersey Comeback,” but he has since abandoned that narrative. Opponents in 2016 will want to tell Americans why.

Economic data can be cut many ways, and Team Christie will note that the unemployment rate was approaching 10 percent when Christie came into office, and is now down to 6.6 percent (compared to 6.1 percent nationally). They will note that no voters really care about credit ratings. But if Christie’s campaign message (which he has recently road-tested) is about expanding opportunity for everyone, how will he explain why the state’s median household income declined 12.2 percent in Christie’s first term?

On paper, Christie’s most significant accomplishment of his first four years was pension reform. Cajoling a Democratic-controlled Legislature he forced unionized public workers to pay more for their health benefits and pensions, saving billions of dollars. This built his national profile and provided a preview of what a President Christie could be: A bipartisan reformer able to tackle the insolvency of Social Security and other national entitlements.

But part of the deal in the 2011 legislation that Christie signed was that the governor would be mandated to make annual payments into the pension system—something Christie’s predecessors had failed to do, to deleterious effects. And yet what happened in June? Christie’s fiscal advisers overestimated revenue, the state ran out of cash, Christie refused to raise taxes—and New Jersey skipped $2.5 billion in pension payments.

To fix the problem Christie is going back to Democrats in the Legislature, looking for more changes to the public employee benefits. This is widely seen as a tacit admission that he didn’t fix the system, as New Jerseyans were led to believe. Democrats, now trying to regain power in Trenton, have little incentive to deal with a Republican presidential candidate, so Christie will have to find a way to both make pension payments and balance budgets while campaigning for president. He will also refuse to raise taxes.

And that last part may be impossible. The state Transportation Trust Fund is $15 billion in debt—and roads need to be paved and bridges need to be fixed in this car-centric state. Already, his new Transportation Commissioner, a Democrat, has insinuated that Christie could raise the state’s low gas tax. If that happens, an accurate ad could then run in the Republican primaries: “Christie raised taxes.”

Meanwhile, the scourge of New Jersey residents—the highest-in-the-nation property taxes levied by localities—continues to go up. That’s part of the reason why the Tax Foundation last month ranked New Jersey 50th on an index of state tax climates. Christie has taken several approaches to controlling property taxes, including working with Democrats to institute a 2 percent property tax cap. The growth of property taxes has slowed, but not their steady rise.

Much of this may not be Christie’s fault—the case can made that given New Jersey’s 565 taxing municipal entities, 600-odd taxing school districts and astronomical debt at the state level, a single governor does not have the constitutional ability to make the kind of structural changes needed to relieve the tax burden. But I doubt many Americans would be inspired by such explanations. Americans understand high taxes—and in both a GOP primary and a general election, voters will remember the sound byte of being dead last in the nation in tax climate.

The fiscal vulnerabilities are deep and varied, touching on all kinds of state matters that can be linked together to create an unflattering narrative. Take Sandy. Christie points to the superstorm, which hit in 2012 just as the economy was turning the corner, as one reason why job growth is slower than elsewhere. But the distribution of federal Sandy aid by the state has gone slower than New Jerseyans hoped— less than a quarter of the housing money was in the hands of Sandy victims by the second anniversary of the storm. There will still be hard-luck stories of people out of their homes, stymied by bureaucratic delays in receiving aid, when a 2016 campaign heats up.

But if opposition researchers want to really capitalize on individual heartbreak, they will look no further than Atlantic City, the fading gambling mecca that no longer makes massive money for business or the state. Crushed by new competitors throughout the region, revenue is down nearly 50 percent since 2006. Christie tried to help by essentially taking control of the tourist areas from a broke and broken city government, and by promising $260 million in tax credits to restart construction on the half-built Revel casino. But Revel went belly up anyway, triggering a cascade of casino closures. Not a dime in tax dollars went to Revel—the breaks were based on earnings that never materialized—but the corporate welfare foes on the left and the right will find something to hate here. The inevitable ad—empty glass skyscrapers on a sad-looking Jersey Shore, with the words “Christie gambled away tax dollars” across the screen—is the only YouTube video that Christie really needs to worry about.