Let’s be honest: for the last four years, President Obama has struggled to find any Republicans to work with.
It’s not for lack of trying.
Conservatives believe the president is a polarizing figure despite his appointment of several Republicans to the senior ranks of his administration, including the secretaries of Defense and Transportation.
They think he’s a socialist despite his copying many of the GOP’s healthcare reform ideas.
And they somehow find it unpalatable to agree with him at a time of national testing, whether overseas in Libya or at home after the financial meltdown of 2008.
You could be forgiven for thinking there’s a pattern here. After all, Congressional Republicans (including current VP candidate Paul Ryan) met on the night of Obama’s inauguration to plot how they could oppose every single bill, including the Recovery Act.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP’s leader and mastermind, explained his strategy to the New York Times when he described his plan to torpedo healthcare reform:
“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” McConnell explained. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”
All of which makes Governor Chris Christie’s ringing endorsement of President Obama’s handling of the storm so important in these closing days of the 2012 campaign.
We don’t know yet know what the political impact of Hurricane Sandy will be. Perhaps voters will appreciate the federal response to the disaster; perhaps they won’t care. Perhaps early voting will be affected, and perhaps it won’t affect enough states to make much difference.
Gov. Christie, on the other hand, has already made an impact. On Wednesday he will tour the disaster zone with President Obama, after two days of heaping praise on the Polarizing One.
“The president has been all over this, and he deserves great credit,” Christie told msnbc’s Morning Joe. “He gave me his number at the White House and told me to call him if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it. It’s been very good working with the president and his administration. It’s been wonderful.”
Christie explained that he had spoken directly with the president on Monday. “He asked me what I needed. I said if he could expedite the Major Disaster Declaration without all the normal FEMA mumbo-jumbo. He got right on it,” he added. “I got a call from FEMA at 2 a.m…and then this morning I understand he signed the Major Disaster Declaration for New Jersey.”
Christie isn’t just any East Coast governor. He was the keynote speaker at the Republican convention this year. He was hotly tipped as a VP pick by some of the most influential conservative pundits in the nation.
He’s the kind of Republican who has built a reputation for calling it like he sees it; for cutting through the verbiage to deliver the truth.
And now he says President Obama has been “wonderful.”
This is the kind of Republican support that President Obama first promised, but has struggled to deliver– at least in Washington.
Back in the day, there was a state senator Obama who first rose to prominence by delivering a 2004 keynote speech of his own, when he seemed to suggest that he might be able to find common ground between Democrats and Republicans.
Later, as a freshman U.S. senator, the same Obama chose to make his first intervention on national politics about the abysmal response to Hurricane Katrina.








