06.21.11
A great candidate: An ordinary guy
This quote on New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie, in a New York Magazine piece on Roger Ailes’ promotion of GOP presidential hopefuls at Fox News:
But there’s other unfinished business, which is why Chris Christie is so appealing. At dinner last summer, they talked about pension reform and getting tough with the unions, and Ailes saw in Christie a great candidate: an ordinary guy, someone you’d be comfortable talking to over your back fence. But Ailes may have seen something else. Christie’s got Fox News TV values with a ready-made reel. And of course, Obama versus Christie is a producer’s dream: black versus white, fat versus thin, professor versus prosecutor. Maybe, just maybe, Ailes could laugh all the way to the White House and the bank.
That’s some deluded stuff. How many guys between three and four hundred pounds do you consider “ordinary” back fence chatting material?
The upshoot of the long piece: Having spent the last two years employing Fox News to boost and amplify the profiles of the unelectable GOP candidates — Santorum, Huckabee (formerly), Palin, Bachmann, Gingrich et all — because it was good money and personally satisfying, Ailes has a serious case of the frets.
He used his network to promote them, boost their careers and aspirations, and make them wealthy. Now he thinks they’re crap.
So Ailes has fixed himself and Fox upon Chris Christie, who’s not significantly distinguishable from the others in terms of belligerence and animosity towards the middle class unless one factors in his sheer size.
The tone of this — ^^^ — is absolutely perfect.