BUT YOU TOLD ME CHRISTIE'S ANGER WAS ALL CAREFULLY SCRIPTED THEATER

You probably know about Melissa Tomlinson, the teacher who confronted Chris Christie yesterday:

I went to listen to him speak.... He came out, shaking everyone's hands as he was getting on the bus. I asked him my question, expecting him to ignore me but he suddenly turned and went off.

I asked him: "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?" His reply: "Because they are!" He said: "I am tired of you people. What do you want?"

This Chris Christie has practically been disappeared by the media since Sandy. In its place we've had Sensitive Lug Christie. I don't blame him for wanting to put that image in his ads, but mainstream journalists have been reporting on Christie as of they don't know the image is as phony as "the New Nixon" was in 1968:





Lately, even when the press mentions the old bullyboy Christie, it's been to inform us that his boorishness is nothing more than theater. Here's Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York magazine a few months ago:

... his anger is directed at different targets and serves a different politics -- more cosmopolitan, less alienated, less stringently individualistic; he offers an alternate idea of what conservatism might have looked like during the Obama years, had it been fed by the frustrations of the suburban middle class rather than those of the suspicious, disempowered fringe.

... he still looks like a bully, still deploys menace as if it were a form of seduction. His crowds come, in part, for the cartoonish pleasure of watching a grown man blow a gasket. But Christie is cannier than that. He is not unmanageably angry so much as he is a mechanism for managing anger, for channeling it and dispersing it tactically.

Yeah, it's all a bit act. He's not really an angry guy -- he's a mere vessel for other people's anger.

Nonsense. Christie's been playing down the anger in this campaign and playing up the (alleged) cuddliness, but the anger is still there -- but now that he doesn't want to put it in the foreground, the fawning press doesn't want to, either. And Democrats, shamefully, have let him get away with this, rather than goading and needling him on the campaign trail, which, if it didn't lead to any "macaca" moments that would have brought him down this year, might have led to embarrassing video that could have hurt him in a 2016 general election.

Everybody seems to want him to have this big victory, but one teacher didn't get the memo, and it's a good thing, too.