Under normal circumstances, when someone has an organized group of critics, and those foes decide to quit, that’s great news. Few of us want to face rhetorical attacks, so when opponents pack and go home, it’s a welcome development.
A super-PAC called Stop Chris Christie is shutting down, saying the New Jersey governor’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is so underwhelming that opposition is no longer necessary.“We looked at the polls and all the indicators seem to be showing that Chris Christie is going nowhere fast,” Tom Bjorklund, treasurer of the political-action committee, said in interview. “It’s always difficult to make the case for stopping someone who isn’t doing well.”
It’s arguably the most painful of all possible insults: we don’t care enough about you to bother criticizing you.
As the Bloomberg Politics report makes clear, the Stop Chris Christie super PAC wasn’t exactly a powerhouse. It was started by activists on the right who saw the New Jersey governor as insufficiently conservative, but the group’s fundraising was anemic.
But its demise is nevertheless the latest slight to Christie’s struggling campaign. In a letter to the Federal Election Commission, Tom Bjorklund said the decision to pull the plug on the endeavor is “based on recent polling and the miserable showing of the candidate in question.”
The Washington Post added, “A burn, to be sure. But a not-entirely-inaccurate one.”
It’s probably a little early in the process to entirely write off the scandal-plagued governor, but the end of this super PAC is a reminder that Christie’s greatest challenge at this point is overcoming the indifference to his national ambitions.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."