New Jersey governor Chris Christie — who just got an endorsement from the Union Leader but isn’t getting anywhere in the polls — recently did an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that did a good job in highlighting his incomparable Christiness and is probably the closest we will ever get to staging My Dinner With Andre on the presidential campaign trail.
Topics discussed include Bruce Springsteen (“Farmer my ass — to get lower property taxes in New Jersey he’s a farmer”), Iran (“I think that Iran is a greater threat than ISIS”), interviewing technique koans (Goldberg: “Maybe the track isn’t track. You ever think of that?”), Marco Rubio (“There’s not a lot of depth there”), President Obama (“He’s done some pretty stupid shit under the philosophy of not doing stupid shit”), and Christie’s explanation for why he said he didn’t want 5-year-old Syrian orphans coming to the U.S.(“Because who’s going to take care of the cute little 5-year-old orphans?”)
When Goldberg asked Christie about his efforts to study up on foreign policy since New Jersey’s international relations needs are limited to liking “Ireland, Italy, and Israel,” Christie jokingly defended his foreign-policy credentials: “You have to deal with Bill de Blasio everyday — that’s foreign policy.” To which the interviewer responded, “You’re like a Tweet machine.”
The candidate and his interviewer also performed a bit of back-and-forth on ball-breaking that, if paired with a catchy dance number, would probably be very similar to what a David Mamet Disney musical would sound like. (“No one will break my balls like you do.”)
The interview is worth a read — even if Christie thought the whole thing was a mess, saying, “I’ve had more organized therapy sessions than this interview.”
