A Bridge Too Far

(Yeah, yeah, it’s an obvious headline. Sorry.) I am highly entertained by the Chris Christie bridge scandal. It’s a fun scandal that this country needs. It’s fun in the sense that it didn’t involve anything too serious; this wasn’t a war crime or anything like that.

As trivial as it seems on the surface, don’t mess with people’s commutes. I would have been livid if I’d been sitting in traffic for four days for no discernable reason. I’m already livid now when I’m late for work because of a dusting of snow or because traffic cones are out while there is no work going on or because of general driver incompetence. I can’t imagine how annoyed I’d be if the delay were due to political shenanigans.

Gov. Christie may very well not have known about the bridge lane closing but I wonder if it happened because of the culture he fostered in his own office. It struck me that the aide emailed “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” and the other aide immediately responded “Got it.” There was no discussion of what it meant, which suggests that there were some kind of standing orders in the governor’s office to act this way. In that scenario, Christie wouldn’t have had to order the lanes closed. The aides would still have been acting in the spirit of his administration.

I don’t buy that people thought it was just a traffic study in Fort Lee. Wouldn’t a traffic engineer want to observe traffic under normal conditions, rather than with several lanes closed and drivers gridlocked?

I accept that politicians do all sorts of underhanded things to win elections but if the allegations are true, closing the bridge lanes didn’t gain Christie anything. If the allegations are true, this was just a petty act of vindictiveness.

Someone online commented that the best political scandals confirm what people already thought about politicians. Nixon was a creep even before Watergate. Clinton was a whore before Monica Lewinski. Christie was a bully before closing a bridge. He has only himself to blame for cultivating the image of a bully. If you want to govern by yelling at teachers and playing tough guy on the boardwalk and implying that a woman speaking at a meeting is a slut, you can’t turn around when people accuse you of being a bully and say, “Moi?”

Anyway, this isn’t the worst thing that ever happened in a political scandal but it is fun watching how it will impact Christie’s career.