Called Chris

Why Hasn’t Biden Called Chris Christie?

The man who never misses a funeral seems to have lost his personal touch when it comes to Republicans he needs — badly — in the fall.

By JONATHAN MARTIN

Chris Christie’s extended flirtation with No Labels should be a wake-up call — for President Joe Biden.

Christie seriously considered whether to run for president as an independent, according to people who spoke to him, and was being actively courted by No Labels. The group shared extensive polling and modeling data with the former New Jersey governor to make their pitch and even presented Christie with a list of potential Democratic running mates to fill out a unity ticket.

For his part, the former New Jersey governor commissioned polling of his own and drafted a potential budget, as first reported by The Washington Post.

That Christie decided not to run is a result of No Labels’ well-documented shortcomings, the structural challenges for any independent presidential candidate and the legacy-defining consequences of being the person who enabled Donald Trump to reclaim the White House.

That Christie considered a third-party bid at all is in part an indictment of Biden.

It has been well over two months since Christie dropped out of the Republican presidential primary. How has Biden not called Christie, whom he’s known since the former governor was in student government as a University of Delaware undergraduate, to ask for his support? Or, if he thought that too soon or too direct, he could at least have asked Christie to get together. But that ask has not been made.

Christie has made it abundantly clear he will not support Trump. And last month, in a conversation on Pod Save America, he even held open the possibility of voting for Biden, while noting: “I’m not there yet.” Why wouldn’t Biden want to enlist one of the most talented public speakers in either party, somebody who ran for the GOP nomination in no small part to be a rhetorical battering ram against Trump? A Caribbean, or even Mediterranean, ambassadorship would be a small price to pay for campaign services rendered.

It’s political malpractice. And Christie isn’t the only anti-Trump Republican or independent waiting for their phone to ring.

Prominent former GOP officeholders, from George W. Bush to Mike Pence to Paul Ryan, also haven’t been contacted.

The same goes for former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who, like Christie, flirted with a No Labels run. Asked in January if Biden ever contacted him, perhaps about an ambassadorship, Hogan said no. As if to drive home the point, Hogan, whose wife is Korean American, happened to mention that he has a nickname in South Korea that translates to “son-in-law.” About two months later, Hogan announced his candidacy, as a Republican, for the Senate.

I reached out to every current Republican lawmaker who has refused to commit to Trump in the general election. Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) Mitt Romney (Utah), Todd Young (Indiana), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) all said the same: they’ve not heard from Biden.

“It is surprising,” Collins told me. “It’s especially surprising because President Biden does understand the Senate, he has personal relationships with some of us.”

And that’s what makes the lack of any overtures so remarkable.

You, dear reader, may be screaming at your phone or computer by now (or before now). I can hear it: these politicians should grasp the stakes in this election and not require any personal touch from the otherwise busy leader of the free world.

But you know who understands the value of a politician receiving a personal touch, perhaps more than anybody else on the planet? Hint: It’s the man who rarely misses a funeral, happily calls the parents of lawmakers on their cell phones and quelled any hint of an uprising against his renomination in part because he’s so kind to, and well-liked by, his fellow officeholders.

This same person — you guessed it, Joe Biden — was also the one who as vice president did so much of the outreach to members of Congress, governors and mayors. And, if we’re being honest, Biden was the person who was frustrated that the detached president he served wasn’t more willing to use the power of the office to woo their fellow office-holders.

If you don’t think the personal matters in politics, well, you ought to talk to more politicians. Or pick up the published memoirs, letters or diaries of them. They tend to record slights. And solids. Both shape their actions.

So how could the Joe Biden whose long-serving advisers’ wince when he tells the story about learning from Jesse Helms — no prize in today’s Democratic primary! — to never question a senator’s motives be so maladroit when it comes to courting anti-Trump Republicans?

Well, yes, he has been busy, what with a war in Ukraine and another in Gaza. To say nothing of bridges collapsing at home.

It’s also that Biden has been focused on protecting his left flank. He’s wisely maintained a close relationship with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as a candidate and president.

The president’s staff, who some Republicans grumble are not letting Biden (truly) be Biden, have been particularly consumed with trying to mollify progressives. Biden, too, has come to recognize the grave political risk posed by, speaking of, that war in Gaza.

Yet just as revealing as those “uncommitted” votes that keep popping up in Democratic primaries are the remarkable number of votes Nikki Haley is still garnering in her political afterlife. These Trump-skeptical Republican primary voters are like the dog that simply will not swallow the pill, no matter how deep you bury it in the Alpo.

Surely Biden, who was in Arizona last week, knows that Haley won 20 percent of the vote (and Ron DeSantis another two percent) in Phoenix’s Maricopa County.

That’s 22 percent for somebody besides Trump in a race that’s long over. These are voters up for grabs in the fall. And voters whose ultimate decision could be shaped by leaders with credibility on the pre-Trump right.

To Biden’s credit, he did call Haley the day she dropped out. Which is more than Trump has done to appeal to his former rival.

Haley, of course, is highly unlikely to support Biden. Wanting a future in the GOP, she’ll likely come around to Trump.

Yet as Haley’s ongoing silence demonstrates, Trump has made that more difficult by doing nothing to win her over.

The same principle applies to Biden. By not reaching out to Republicans uneasy with their own nominee, the president is making it easier for them to criticize him.

Look, as the president would say, many of these Republicans will never publicly support Biden. They have real concerns about his administration (and some want to win future primaries).

As Romney told me by way of trying to explain why Biden has not called, the president’s policies give him pause.

“Biden has not asked for my support,” said Romney. “I’m pretty critical of his mess at the border—that should have cooled his jets!”

The point, though, isn’t for Biden to turn all these figures into his campaign surrogates. Perhaps some will do that, former Rep. Liz Cheney being the most likely prospect to embrace that sort of Stop Trump mission. But the more realistic goal, certainly with GOP senators, is to soften their criticism of him and make them feel more comfortable denouncing Trump.

Would figures such as Romney or Collins still be uneasy with Biden’s immigration policy if the president had them and their spouses to Camp David or a private White House dinner? Of course. Yet would the senators be somewhat more restrained in their public judgment of Biden? Well, it’s a people business.

At the heart of Biden’s challenge this year is that, unlike in 2020 when he was largely a vehicle to end Covid-19 and defeat Trump, he’s a fully defined candidate in his own right, having made decisions that appealed to some voters and alienated others.

“He’s the incumbent so he has weaknesses he didn’t have in 2020,” as Bill Kristol, the anti-Trump commentator and one-time vice-presidential chief of staff, said. “He needs to be more active and aggressive in getting as broad an anti-Trump coalition as possible.”

It is, Kristol said, “mystifying” that Biden has not done more to win over major Republican figures who are opposed to Trump: “He ought to have Chris Christie to lunch.”

Immediately after dropping out of the GOP presidential primary in January, Christie told people he was highly unlikely to run as a third-party candidate under the No Labels banner. There was only a 10 percent chance he would do so, he said at the time.

Yet earlier this month, he was sounding a lot more like a candidate. Republicans who saw him at the annual American Enterprise Institute conference in Sea Island, Georgia, told me Christie sure didn’t seem like somebody who was ready to return to punditry.

And last week, when Christie spoke on David Axelrod’s podcast, the former governor was all but signaling his campaign message. “I will do whatever I can to try to make sure that the country doesn’t go through what I think will be the misery of a second Trump term,” Christie said.

He resisted the temptation in part because he found No Labels’ infrastructure and finances wanting. Their handing him a list of potential running mates that included (in some cases lapsed) Democrats such as congresswoman-turned-Fox News personality Tulsi Gabbard, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and even Maryland’s Doug Gansler also didn’t help.

However, that Christie nearly mounted an independent campaign that would’ve given the center-right voters Biden needs another place to go should not only alarm the president. It should rouse him to the challenge. This is not 2020.

“I talk to a lot of Republicans, Democrats and Independents,” said Collins. “I gotta tell you, it’s really rare that I find anyone who’s happy with their choices.”