Chris Christie of New Jersey won re-election by a crushing margin on Tuesday, a victory that vaulted him to the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology the New York Times reports.
Mr. Christie declared that his decisive win should be a lesson for the nation’s broken political system and his feuding party: In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 700,000, Mr. Christie won a majority of the votes of women and Hispanics and made impressive inroads among younger voters and blacks — groups that Republicans nationally have struggled to attract.
The governor prevailed despite holding positions contrary to those of many New Jersey voters on several key issues, including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the minimum wage, and despite an economic recovery that has trailed the rest of the country.
He attracted a broad coalition by campaigning as a straight-talking, even swaggering, leader who could reach across the aisle to solve problems.
“I know that if we can do this in Trenton, N.J., then maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now and see how it’s done,” Mr. Christie told a packed crowd at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, where his musical idol, Bruce Springsteen, holds holiday concerts, and where red and blue lighting gave the gathering a presidential campaign-like glow.
The governor all but lectured Republicans about how to appeal to groups beyond their base. “We don’t just show up in the places where we’re comfortable, we show up in the places we’re uncomfortable,” he said, adding, “You don’t just show up 6 months before an election.”
Around the country, Republicans alarmed by the surging grass roots support for the Tea Party wing were cheered by Mr. Christie’s success, saying they hope their party will learn not only from the size of Mr. Christie’s margin over Barbara Buono, a Democratic state senator, but also from the makeup of his support.
“We’ll be led back by our governors, and Chris Christie is now at the forefront of that resurgence,” said Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
I’m now convinced that the game of Golf is a Very Difficult game. For over 10-years, Tiger Woods had made us believe it was as simple as getting up in the morning and tying a pair of sneakers. But, for those of you that play this great game, we know different. Now, it appears that Tiger is facing that fact too.
Although Tiger has won five times in 2013, he has been Major-less since 2008. He has invited the doubters, nay-sayers and media deniers along with the greatest of Monday morning quarterbacks into the fray of questioning the State of his Game. Yes, he’s won five times but Tiger himself has said he measures success by the number of Majors he wins.
Tiger Woods is chasing Jack Nicklaus’ career majors mark of 18 which some had believed would never be challenged but then, a young kid who had won 3-consecutive Amateur Championships prior to turning Golf Professional, sprung onto the scene. Winning his first major championship at the famed Masters Championship in 1997, a New sheriff was in town and ready to take the reins from the beloved Nicklaus. Fast forward to 2008, Tiger is sitting on 14-majors. And this sit is five years long. Just to put things in perspective, Nicklaus too had run into a 5-year slump of winning a major from 1980 – 1986.
There are similarities in these two great golf champions as well from a perspective standpoint. Coming into this week’s final Major Championship of the year, the PGA Championship, Tiger and Nicklaus had the exact number of majors won (14) to major appearances, 63. Jack won his 15th at this timeframe. Tiger didn’t. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing. Tiger is still on a good pace to surpass the great Jack Nicklaus but the window of opportunity is slowly closing.
Even though it’s been five years since Tiger has hoisted a Major championship trophy, he has a number of things on his side. One, he is only 37-years old. Nicklaus had won his 15th at the age of 38 so a bit of encouragement from a parallel standpoint. Also, Tiger is in tremendous shape. He is known for his workout regimen and has a body fat around 1%. He has been through a number of injuries that has slowed him down over the years including knee surgery that placed him on the golf shelf for a season. His personal indiscretion in his marriage also delayed his opportunities not to mention his much talked about swing changes, swing coaches (3), and firing of his long time caddy, Steve Williams. Through it all, he still wins golf tournaments.
Tiger’s main adversary appears to be Tiger. Touching on the swing changes from the previous paragraph, Tiger has gone through four of them. Since his college days at Stanford University which was his original golf swing, his first coach as a professional was Butch Harmon. Butch set him on his pathway to a string of Major wins with a swing that current Masters champ Adam Scott is still using today. That was swing #2. His third swing came from Hank Haney where many questioned why Tiger would leave Butch when he was on such a Major role. Although Tiger won a few more majors with Hank, the golfing world felt that Haney ‘ruined’ Tiger’s swing and game. This was the first time Tiger had gone into any type of win slump. Finally, Tiger has moved on from Haney to now, his new coach, Sean Foley. And with Foley, another swing change, #4.
Golf is a game of repetition, feel, vision, creativity, guts, perseverance, nerves, mental toughness and again, repetition. That is what I believe is hurting Tiger. I recall a commercial with a great golfer in his own right, Vijay Singh. In that commercial where Vijay was on the tee addressing his ball, it was a slow motion shot of him taking his swing. While going through the backswing, he had All of these swing thoughts going through his head. It was like a Pop Up Video with about 20 different things popping into his mind at once. That’s what I think is going on with Tiger. Just watching him go through his routine at approach when he rehearses his swing, he approaches the ball and sometimes does the complete opposite or Double Crosses himself which causes a horrendous shot per Tiger Woods Standards.
Having all of these swing coaches and swing changes places a lot of conflict in the mind and body. Imagine doing something as simple as tying your shoes the same way for years only to have someone else show you a different way to tie them. Then 5-years later, someone comes along and teaches you another way and finally, the latest person comes along and says, “No, he’s a New Way”. Eventually, your mind gets in the way of something that had been so simple in the past. You begin to revert back to the past as opposed to living in the present.
Golf is an amazing game. Watching the pros on TV, I have a brand new appreciation for them and the game they’ve made fun for me, a hacker at best. It’s not easy. Not even for Tiger Woods. Yes, he makes it look easy at times, but it’s not. For four consecutive days, these guys beat this little white ball around the course in hopes of winning the big trophy and a whole lot of cash to boot. A lot can happen in four days which is what makes this game equally challenging. This is another reason I think Tiger will break Jack’s record; Mental Toughness.
I’m a believer in this guy. He’s won 14-majors and about to break the ALL-Time wins title held by Sam Snead for years. Snead has 82-career wins and Tiger is sitting on 79. He is the money leader to date this season, the FedEx leader that awards the winner of the FedEx playoff championship a $10 million annuity at the end of the season and he’s the #1 golfer in the World. Not too shabby to me. After winning five times this year, he’ll get that record next year if he remains healthy. Although that achievement is Huge in its own right, Tiger still has his sights on becoming the ALL-Time Majors leader. And so do we Tiger, so do we.
There’s been a lot of attention focused on Robin Kelly, who won the Democratic nomination this week in the Illinois special election to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. in Congress. But what about the GOP nominee?
Ex-convict Paul McKinley is claiming victory over Eric Wallace, a multimedia company owner. TheChicago Tribune reports
McKinley’s rap sheet includes burglaries, armed robbery and aggravated battery. McKinley has a 23-vote lead over Wallace, who told the newspaper that it would be “an embarrassment” if McKinley were the Republican nominee to face Kelly on April 9.
It’s funny how elections make clear what is already in plain sight. The decline of the Republican Party and the discrediting of its radical right-wing has been evident for the past 3 to 4 years. Instead of following an agenda, they’ve focused on obstruction. When they deigned to speak about policy, it was usually in the negative: anti-abortion, anti-marriage equality, anti-tax for millionaires and anti-immigrant. It’s no wonder that women, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans were anti-GOP.
Oh yes, there will still be Tea Partiers and other conservatives in Congress, but they will be marginalized and will vote against anything that smacks of compromise or common sense. Others, though, will see the light. Lindsay Graham has already shown his grace by working with New York’s Charles Schumer on an immigration bill that could come in the lame duck session. There’s even talk that the environment and climate change could enable this Congress, or the next one, to come to grips with what’s been obvious to the rest of us for over a decade. Along with tax reform, that could make these next seven weeks the most productive of this eminently forgettable Congressional session.
And it’s all because of an election that highlighted a get-out-the-vote machine that will become an instant classic in the next edition of Political Science textbooks across the nation. President Obama’s team was able to turn a bad economy and a seemingly insurmountable deficit of enthusiasm into a convincing win, in large part because the Romney campaign aligned itself with the anti-math crowd and convinced itself that Obama couldn’t win.
But this was an election about ideas, and Obama won that battle as well. Most voters agreed with the president on taxes, marriage equality, women’s reproductive rights, immigration and investing in education and research. Medicare, which was supposed to be the GOP’s winning issue, was a dud. Paul Ryan was forced early on to abandon both this issue and his meat cleaver budget, leaving him with little to say except to parrot Romney’s ultimately failed ideas. That the election was close is a testament to how divided the country is, but the ever-decreasing white vote that went for Romney was no match for the rainbow coalition that came out for the president.
Is it an enduring coalition for Democrats? It will be if the Republicans don’t shed some of their antiquated ideas. I expect we’ll see a lot more of Marco Rubio over the next two years and a little more of Chris Christie, who raised his profile as someone willing to work with the other party to get things done during the devastation caused by Sandy and Obama’s visit to New Jersey. (Memo to the GOP: Sandy meant very little to your electoral loss. Did women and Latinos decide to vote Obama after a hurricane, or after your minions savaged themselves by equating rape with God’s plan?) We might even see some moderates peeking over the curtain from time to time.
The main lesson we all need to take from the election is that the people want the government to help solve our problems. They don’t want government completely out of the way, but would rather that it do what it’s supposed to do: keep us safe, keep us working, and taking care that the safety net catches those who need it. We’ll take care of the rest. The Democrats can’t get too full of themselves and their message because this was not a mandate election. It was a reaffirmation election that told Barack Obama to complete the job he started in 2009 and to work with the other side to fix the system. The GOP will obstruct and filibuster at its peril. They need to work with the president on all issues and not wait until the next election to see if they can outflank him. That didn’t work for the past two years and it won’t work in the future.
I am optimistic for the first time in a while. It might be misplaced, or I might be more naive than the next guy, but I really think we’ll get the government unplugged and start to see some real progress.
The wave has crashed. Now let’s hope the tide has turned.
At least it was quick and fairly painless. Not for Newt, but for the rest of us who need to move on to something important like Friday’s jobs numbers or the Super Bowl.
How’d I do? Again, not bad. My prediction is first, then the actual.
Romney 43% 46%
Gingrich 31% 32%
Santorum 14% 13%
Paul 11% 7%
I thought Paul would do better, but at this point we’re beyond the possible phase of the race and have entered the Nomination Zone. Boutique candidates need not apply
The other issue is this continued talk of the motivated Republican voter. Florida GOP officials had said that they were looking for north of 2 million primary voters, and it looks as though they fell a bit short. So much for the enthusiasm gap. Democrats are becoming more energized and could match Republican participation in the fall.
Newt says he’s staying in the race. We’ll see.
Will conservatives flock to Santorum as the conservative du jour? I’m thinking not. Mitt is in a commanding position and will be the nominee. The rest of the campaign will measure how much he’s been damaged by the infighting and how much that will affect his chances against Obama.
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