Chris Christie Goes Off Script and Raises Expectations for Romney in Debates

Last updated on October 1st, 2012 at 09:12 pm

Yet another surrogate of Mitt Romney’s seems to be suffering from message confusion or a personal agenda. The Romney campaign has been busy telling the press how unfair the debates are going to be because Barack Obama is Superman of the Spoken Word whereas poor Mitt Romney has only been practicing every single day for weeks now. They set Romney up as the victim of a President Obama’s unfair skills, hoping to lower the bar for a Romney handicap similar to the one given to Sarah Palin in 2008, when a wink passed for solid debate skills.

But today Chris Christie told NBC’s David Gregory that Romney was going to change the entire narrative of the campaign on Wednesday’s debate.

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Christie promised, “On Wednesday night Mitt Romney is going to be standing on the same stage as the president of the United States. And I am telling you David, come Thursday morning the entire narrative of this race is going to change.”

Christie buttressed this thought with the anecdotal notation that “the general public that I speak to in New Jersey and elsewhere are just beginning to really tune in to this race,” therefor the swing states are not paying attention to the race either, in Christie’s mind.

You thought the Romney campaign already had their re-boot, their reignite, their redo, but what they haven’t had was a restart. Christie assures us, “Wednesday night is the restart of this campaign. I think you’re going to see those (polling) numbers move right back in the other direction” as a result of the debate.”

It also seems that Chris Christie has his eye on his own career, rather than Mitt Romney’s 2012 race, since this is the second time in one day that he stabbed Romney in the back. We note that even as Christie was selling the Game Changer, Ryan was tamping down expectations on Fox, saying, “I don’t think one event is going to make or break this campaign.” Oopsie.

We are told Romney has been practicing a series of zingers with which to win this debate, because nothing says I’m getting specific like rehearsed attack lines. Sounding dangerously 80’s, team Romney says the candidate is going to create a series of “moments” with his zingers and lull the President into sounding smug. That will surely be a feat for Mr. 47%. Romney was quite pleased with himself when he announced one of his zingers is going to be a Reagan redux, “There you go again.”

That line would actually work better for Obama given the consistent inaccuracies of the Romney campaign and his failure to get specific on anything without immediately taking it back.

We already know that Romney’s strategy is to make Obama Carter and himself Reagan. The overreaching problem with this is that Obama is not Carter and Romney is surely no Reagan. We recall that Reagan thought Social Security and Medicare were important programs. He also raised taxes many times. If anything, Obama is to liberalism what Reagan was to conservatism. Obama has mainstreamed the fundamentals of liberalism in the same way Reagan stamped conservatism with the American flag.

You heard it from Chris Christie’s mouth – this debate is going to turn the race around. So by Friday we should be seeing Romney soar in the swing states once he reintroduces himself to America for the 800th time. This time, this time, they’re gonna believe.

Christie stuck the knife in all of the way today, declaring, “I’m not going to sit here and complain about coverage of the campaign. As a candidate, if you do that, you’re losing.” But that is all that the Romney campaign has been doing, up to and including their hysteria over the debates, and Christie knows it.

Sarah Jones

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