A year ago, both seemed like probable 2016 contenders, but things have changed. | AP Photos The GOP's tarnished golden boys

For a while, Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell were untouchable.

The first major Republicans elected after the 2008 Obama landslide, the tough-as-nails Garden Stater and the straight-edged Virginian heralded the conservative resurgence in 2010 and pointed the way toward sweeping victories for small-government candidates on the state level. A year ago, both seemed like plausible and even probable 2016 presidential candidates, two representatives of a fresher GOP, anchored in fiscal discipline, support for states’ rights and opposition to public labor.


Now, clouds hang over both the GOP golden boys of 2009. McDonnell’s situation is far graver: As he left office over the weekend, the governor’s Boy Scout image was in tatters amid an ongoing criminal investigation of huge, undisclosed gifts that his family accepted from a political contributor.

( QUIZ: How well do you know Chris Christie?)

Christie, meanwhile, saw the start of his second term engulfed last week in a different kind of investigation: a legislative inquiry, and a just-opened federal probe, into several of his aides meddling with traffic patterns in Northern New Jersey as an apparent act of political retaliation.

The near-simultaneous humbling of both men marks an important checkpoint in the history of the post-George W. Bush Republican Party, as a first set of next-generation conservatives begins to run up against the consequences of their own errors. Much as second-term presidents — not least of all Barack Obama — often struggle with the fallout from their first-term decisions, a new round of GOP state executives has only begun to confront messy realities of their own making.

Republicans emphasize that the two governors’ predicaments are not equivalent. McDonnell could face a federal indictment after the end of the single term Virginia governors are allowed. Christie, on the other hand, has totally denied any personal wrongdoing; no evidence has surfaced tying him directly to unlawful acts of retribution.

Yet last week, the two men adopted comparable poses of self-abasement, speaking to their constituents in tones of remorse at dramatic odds with the chest-thumping triumphalism that was a shared hallmark of both men during political appearances over the past four years. On the contrary, the two governors meditated together on the imperfections of humankind.

( PHOTOS: Bob McDonnell’s career)

“I am not perfect, but I have always worked tirelessly to do my very best for Virginia,” McDonnell told the state Legislature on Wednesday in a farewell address. “As a flawed human being, I’ve sometimes fallen short of my own expectations.”

In a news conference Thursday, Christie struck a similar chord, telling reporters: “Human beings are not perfect, and mistakes are made.”

“I am responsible for what happened. I am sad to report to the people of New Jersey that we fell short,” Christie said, describing himself as “heartbroken” and “humiliated.”

The cheerful and defiant strains of their 2009 races — when McDonnell campaigned on the cheesy, upbeat slogan “Bob’s for Jobs,” and Christie taunted his opponent to “man up and call me fat” — seemed like ancient history.

( From POLITICO Magazine: 15 Chris Christie Controversies You Missed)

If Christie’s and McDonnell’s woes are meaningfully different in the details, there are certain overlapping themes. While McDonnell may have crossed ethical or legal lines in the specific gifts he received, the acceptance of lavish special treatment is de rigueur in Virginia’s capital city, where legislators can take many kinds of favors as long as they practice full disclosure. When the Virginia governor says he did not do anything illegal, his friends say he firmly believes it.

In Christie’s case, it is hard to imagine that his staffers and appointees would have behaved in such a cartoonishly goony way — deliberately throwing a small city into gridlock, while firing off sneering emails calling Fort Lee’s mayor an “idiot” and “the little Serbian” — without at least some sense that rough-and-tumble politics is simply the Jersey way.

Perhaps the essential similarity between the two governors, optimistic conservatives say, is that the examples they set for the Republican Party remain valuable despite the duo’s current circumstances — that McDonnell’s emphasis on kitchen-table issues like education and mass transit, and Christie’s ability to compromise on fiscal issues with a hardball Democratic Legislature, are still worth emulating.

Former Bush adviser Peter Wehner, who has defended both governors in the past from hard-right critics, said McDonnell’s career was probably “over” and that Christie had so far handled a “serious and problematic issue” with comparative grace. Regardless of their fate as individuals, Wehner said the GOP victors of 2009 had already pointed the way forward for many of the other Republicans who have won since then.

( Also on POLITICO: A guide to Chris Christie's 'Bridgegate')

“You have to judge them in part on their policy achievements, which I think are really impressive with McDonnell. That’s why it’s such a shame,” Wehner said. “Christie still is an effective governor. I don’t think Republicans should turn away from those lessons — or certainly, in Christie’s case, shouldn’t turn away from him.”

Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone, the right-of-center political handicapper who has written admiringly of both governors, praised the socially conservative McDonnell for making himself palatable to a swing-state electorate and touted Christie’s ability to work across party lines “with Democratic legislators who come from private-sector union backgrounds.”

He pointed out that in some respects, these governors are merely facing a challenge that would-be presidents in the U.S. Senate have long confronted: watching their records picked apart in excruciating detail in the national spotlight.

( Also on POLITICO: Chris Christie’s damage control)

“We should look at the record these people have in local government, if they’re going to be president, to see how they operate. Did we look at Bill Clinton’s record closely enough? Republican candidates tend to get more scrutiny at this level than Democrats,” Barone said, adding: “The Christie thing has some relevance to his character.”

It remains to be seen how Christie’s constituents will judge his performance last week in the Fort Lee traffic uproar and what effect a protracted investigation might have on the governor’s White House aspirations. Top Christie supporters were adamant that he had succeeded in turning the page on a painful episode in which the governor himself was blameless.

By coincidence, McDonnell can thank Virginia’s notorious traffic problems for keeping his own approval ratings positive under difficult circumstances: Voters have continued to applaud him for passing a multibillion-dollar transportation funding law that represents the largest step in a quarter-century toward opening up the state’s gridlocked roads.

At least a few on the right were nearly ready to write the joint political obituary for the 2009 generation: National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty declared in a column that events in New Jersey and Virginia represent “the failure of the GOP’s class of 2009.”

“Fifty months later,” he wrote, that year’s election night “appears to have been a false dawn, as both men face accusations, and mounting evidence, of betraying the public trust.”