America’s political scandal of the moment focuses on the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, and hideous traffic jams on one of the main bridges leading into New York City.
Viewed from the safe distance of Dubai (a city not unfamiliar with bad traffic) this must seem a bit puzzling. First, how did one city’s four-day-long traffic problem turn into a national issue and, second, why, one may ask, do Republicans keep comparing it to Benghazi?
The short answer is: Presidential politics. According to most recent opinion polls, Christie is the Republican who stands the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Never mind that the election is still nearly three years away, that Hillary has not said she will run (though, frankly, it would be pretty astonishing if she did not), that Christie is not an announced candidate either (though, like Hillary, everyone — literally everyone — expects him to get into the race eventually) or that neither of them is guaranteed their party’s presidential nomination (if anyone ought to understand the perils of being anointed the ‘inevitable nominee’ three years out it is Hillary Clinton).
The scandal began last September when workers blocked off several approach lanes to the George Washington Bridge for four days, ostensibly as part of a traffic study. The bridge connects New York City to neighbouring New Jersey and, as pretty much everyone in America now knows, is the busiest bridge in the world. The ensuing traffic jam was epic, at least by American standards (anyone who recalls the experience of trying to get from, say, Dubai Media City to the World Trade Centre via Shaikh Zayed Road a decade or so ago will have a good idea what I am talking about).
What turned this into a scandal was the revelation that the whole thing was manufactured by Christie’s aides and political cronies to punish the mayor of Ft. Lee, the city at the New Jersey end of the bridge, after he refused to endorse Christie for reelection. When one person involved in all this expressed some mild concern for children missing classes because their school buses were stuck in the clogged traffic, another replied the parents of those children were probably voting for Christie’s opponent in the upcoming election (Christie is a Republican, Ft. Lee is a heavily Democratic city).
Even by the standards of politics, this seemed shockingly petty. Christie promptly fired the offending aides and conducted an uncharacteristically apologetic news conference lasting nearly two hours, during which he repeatedly insisted he learned about all this only a few hours before the rest of the country did.
The consensus among the political chattering classes was that for the governor to have any future in national politics that assertion had better be true. What happened next, however, was strange. Left-leaning media (and Democrats in New Jersey’s state legislature) immediately began digging for evidence to prove Christie a liar. Republicans said little directly in Christie’s defence, but a number of them took to TV, radio and the internet to denounce ... Hillary. “I think what you saw the other day was leadership” party chairman Reince Priebus told NBC News, adding that he wished Hillary had done something similar following the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. The far-right website Newsmax ran a story headlined ‘Hillary is big loser in Bridge-gate’.
On some level, Hillary ought to see all of this as a back-handed compliment; a sign that she is the figure the Republicans fear above all others. Political fear, after all, is the only thing that explains the semi-hysterical comparisons to Benghazi. It was coincidental that the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report on Benghazi this week. This was damning on many levels: Calling the deaths there “preventable” and criticising the intelligence community for its continuing inability to “anticipate ... potential terrorism hot spots” and pass that information along to policymakers. Its judgements, however, focused mainly on process and institutional culture. It had little to say about Hillary’s leadership as Secretary of State. That was reserved for a separate addendum to the report, signed only by the committee’s Republicans.
The Senate report is not going to end Hillary’s political career. The bridge scandal is not likely to end Christie’s. The crazy partisanship surrounding both, however, undermines legitimate concerns on both sides of the aisle. The more Benghazi discussions focus on partisan point-scoring the less likely they are to solve the problems that left the consulate vulnerable in the first place. To the extent that Christie can convince people that examining his and his aides’ conduct is mostly an effort to keep him out of the White House, he avoids any real discussion of the vindictive office culture that the bridge scandal highlights.
Both debates may fuel cable news ratings. Neither does much to make government run more smoothly though.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches Political Science at the University of Vermont.