Leaving aside the false premise that Christie's hardnosed style was ever particularly hidden, Klein fails to draw a key distinction between Christie and LBJ. What he misses—and what makes Christie's behavior worse—is the difference between ruthlessness toward other political figures undertaken to benefit the people (which may be wrong, but may be excused), and ruthlessness toward the people undertaken to benefit a political figure (which is worse, and inexcusable). Bullying is never right, that is to say, but in assessing degrees of wrong in politics, voters tend to look at who gets hurt—a political colleague or an everyday citizen—and who benefits: you or your constituents.

Take, with regard to the question of who gets hurt, some of Christie's earlier acts of alleged "retribution" that Klein quotes from Kate Zernike's December New York Times article:

a former governor who was stripped of police security at public events; a Rutgers professor who lost state financing for cherished programs; a state senator whose candidate for a judgeship suddenly stalled; another senator who was disinvited from an event with the governor in his own district.

As petty and vengeful as these stories sound, each of them concerns a person who had entered the political arena. (The Rutgers professor, Alan Rosenthal, was an active public figure, served on a legislative redistricting commission, and was ranked first on a New Jersey political blog's 2011 list of "the 100 most influential [non-elected] personalities in New Jersey politics"; he was also an eminent scholar of state legislatures, respected on both sides of the aisle, who passed away last July.) These facts don't make Christie's alleged behavior praiseworthy; no citizen's ideal political leader would be petty or vengeful. But it matters that the recipients were people who sought out politics.

Politics is often called a contact sport, and in this sense it is like actual contact sports. You waive your right not to get tackled when you choose to join a football game; you don't when you choose to walk to the grocery store. It beggars belief that anyone would enter politics—especially New Jersey politics—and not expect to take some hits. Though nothing to be proud of, politics in this country has always been a field in which someone might stall your judgeship, cut off your project's funding, or exclude you from an event to score a political point. Christie takes personal hits, too—his weight has certainly been mocked in public by his political opponents more than any private citizen would ever tolerate.

Many politicians accept the slings and arrows of the game because they accept the basic Machiavellian premise: "not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good," as philosopher-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff has argued, "but also that they shouldn't worry about it." It's the recognition that the political space is one of conflict, and one where morality is limited in some ways.