http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/rand-paul-chris-christie-95032.htmlWhy Rand Paul and Chris Christie went to war
By ALEXANDER BURNS and MAGGIE HABERMAN
Well, that was a splendid little war.
Over the past week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul took the GOP’s intraparty bickering to a new level, openly savaging each other on issues of national security, privacy and government spending. When Christie wasn’t challenging Paul to explain himself to the families of Sept. 11 victims, Paul was accusing Christie of demanding federal handouts for hurricane relief and, in an obvious double entendre, labeling the Garden Stater the “king of bacon.”
Both men stepped back from the brink of nuclear-level confrontation on Wednesday, as Paul told a New Hampshire radio station that while Christie started the fight, he’d be glad to “ratchet it down.” Christie dismissed Paul’s barbs as “juvenile” in his own radio appearance.
But the battle lines between the two men have been drawn in a more lasting way. More than anything else, what the firefight revealed was the extent to which Paul and Christie — two pols who have thrived on the appeal of their raw authenticity — have placed drastically different bets on the future of the Republican Party. And as they approach the start of the long 2016 campaign, both men are so deeply confident that they have the political and ideological high ground, that each can scarcely understand how his adversary could be making such an epic miscalculation.
In some respects, the Christie-Paul blowup is a case study in the Republican Party’s internal divisions: The two men hail from such different wings of the GOP, and both are so nationally ambitious, that there is little short-term risk in escalating their rivalry.
A Pew survey published Thursday showed that Paul and Christie currently draw their support from starkly different constituencies. Paul’s strongest support comes from self-identifying tea party Republicans, 70 percent of whom said they view him favorably. Among other Republicans, Paul’s favorability rating was 43 percent. For Christie, those numbers were closer to even: Forty-seven percent of tea partiers viewed him favorably (while 35 percent said the opposite) and 48 percent of other Republicans said they had a positive impression of him.
Advisers to both Paul and Christie say that neither man was seeking out a total-war confrontation. As the Paul camp sees it, it was responding to an unprovoked attack from Christie: The popular governor tore into the libertarian wing of the party, including Paul, at a Republican Governors Association event last Thursday, for what he called their impractical and “esoteric” views on national security.
According to Christie-world, that cannon blast wasn’t intended to be the start of a drawn-out fight. That’s just the way the famously flamboyant Christie operates, they say; he was answering a question, and he always turns things up to 11.
But both men also have short- and long-term political incentives to fight so furiously. For Christie, being perceived as the straight-talking champion of Sept. 11 families, taking on a clueless Washington GOP, can be only a positive in his 2013 reelection campaign.
Over the long haul, any Christie presidential campaign would want to be perceived as tough on defense, a traditional weak point for governors seeking the Oval Office, though several Republicans in Christie’s orbit strenuously played down the notion that his jabs at the Paul cohort were part of a deliberate 2016 strategy.
Paul, meanwhile, knows he must clear the commander-in-chief test as he crafts himself into a national candidate. The libertarian-leaning senator was attacked in his first campaign – back in 2010 – as a national security squish whose devotion to civil liberties was at odds with fighting terrorism.
Three years later, Paul has grown more confident not only that he’s on the right side of the issue, but that substantively the politics have moved in his favor. Paul’s celebrated anti-drone filibuster was Exhibit A on that count.
Doug Stafford, a senior adviser to the senator, said that Paul’s spat with Christie should be viewed in the context of a national conservative advocate giving no quarter to a familiar set of critics.
“Rand is out there saying, ‘We can have a strong defense, a robust national security policy and keep our respect for rights at the same time.’ It’s the same message he’s been talking about for several years now,” Stafford said. “And I don’t think it’s risky, I think more and more people are agreeing with it.”
Another Paul adviser shared internal polling from the 2010 campaign showing that it was Paul’s showdown with his GOP primary opponent, Trey Grayson, over national security that propelled the insurgent to a 13-percentage-point lead over the establishment-backed Grayson (Paul eventually won the primary by 23 points.)
When Grayson ran an ad accusing Paul of wanting to shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay and return terrorists to the battlefield, Paul responded with a direct-to-camera spot. He expressed “outrage” about the Sept. 11 attacks but called Grayson’s commercial “shameful” and told his opponent: “It dishonors you.”
The senator answered Christie’s criticism over the last week in a similarly contemptuous tone, accusing Christie of trying to shield himself in the “cloak of 9/11 victims” as he attacks Paul’s worldview.
“We feel like we’ve been through this fight before on national security within the Republican Party, and we won it decisively in 2010,” the Paul adviser said.
Christie advisers declined to speak on the record about the politics of his confrontation with Paul. Aides have underscored the personal nature of national security issues in general and Sept. 11, specifically, for Christie, who was named New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor on Sept. 10, 2001.
If his initial comments criticizing libertarianism sounded especially cutting, that’s probably why. He came to political prominence as a U.S. attorney at a moment when another former prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, was an icon of the national GOP due to his leadership on Sept. 11.
Christie’s team has not fanned the flames of the blowup with Paul, apparently content to let the governor’s bluntly stated and firmly held national security views speak for themselves. Top Christie adviser Mike DuHaime took to Twitter only to push back on Paul’s characterization of Christie as a big spender, writing: “What a joke. New Jersey’s budget is smaller today than in FY ’08. Too bad the federal government can’t say that.”
New York Rep. Peter King, a vocal Paul critic who is toying with his own possible 2016 campaign, said he doesn’t believe there was “much planning” in Christie’s offensive against Paul. On the contrary, King said he believes Christie has been speaking from an authentic sense of outrage with national Republicans who are detached from the concerns of people in New Jersey — from constituents directly affected by Sept. 11 to the Hurricane Sandy victims whose federal aid was held up in the GOP House.
When Paul accused Christie of having a “gimme” attitude on storm aid, that took the fight to a whole other register.
“I think last December and January was an eye-opening experience for Chris Christie in terms of different elements of the party that he didn’t realize were there,” said King.
He voiced concern about the fading memory of Sept. 11 in national politics: “Even some people in New York and New Jersey have forgotten about it, but certainly some people in other parts of the country have forgotten about it.”
Republicans who aren’t aligned in the Christie-Paul spat say the larger atmospherics of national politics likely favor Paul, at least for the moment. While Paul’s views on restraining the national security state may seem like a sharp swerve for a GOP that last won a national election with a Bush-Cheney ticket, several operatives said the terms of debate have shifted now that Barack Obama is president and conservatives in general are concerned about the growing power of the state.
In early-state New Hampshire, the conservative editorial page of the influential Union Leader newspaper mocked Christie’s dismissive view of the surveillance debate, writing that “the entirety of Christie’s argument” was “9/11!”
Union Leader editorial editor Drew Cline told POLITICO that he thinks Christie is missing that the security-versus-liberty debate is a “fundamental part of what conservatism is.” It highlights Christie’s “provincial” quality as Mr. Jersey, Cline said.
“This strikes me as one of his gut-reaction, classic Chris Christie moments. ‘Oh yeah? Well, you don’t talk that way in New Jersey, buddy, because in New Jersey we see it this way.’ And that’s great if you’re governor of New Jersey and you’re going to stay governor of New Jersey,” Cline said. “But this is a guy who apparently aspires to the highest office in the land. To come across as being unfamiliar with the very concept that the Constitution protects citizens from having their rights trampled on by the state is not going to play well nationally in a Republican primary.”
New Hampshire-based strategist David Carney, a senior adviser to Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign, said it was easy to call the winner of this bout: “Round One: Rand.”
“There is a real libertarian bent to the GOP and many other voting groups — not in the Ron Paul class, but being fed up with Big Government in general. Real Republicans and most Americans are willing to discuss the role of America in the world and for limits or at least adjustments,” Carney said.
Carney added: “This early skirmish, in the totality of the race, on a scale of zero to 10, is a zero.”
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