lawyer to a lawyer who is exactly the opposite. he has a long string of contributions to democratic candidates in new jersey, including most recently apparently maxing out to cory booker s senate come pain, while not giving a penny to chris christie. so this is a real switch in the dynamics of her defense representation. well, you re right, lawrence. i think a key is something you alluded to before is that her original lawyer kind of suddenly said he quote, unquote, realized he had a conflict of interest. and the conflict of interest was he was an elected commissioner in new jersey. and that s not something you forget that you were. what people are thinking happened here was that he told him she might be interested in pursuing a deal and talking about higher ups in the administration and that would have created a conflict of interest for him. and nick, it would seem that the lawyer she has now, michael
true, but it is also true only have two hours to tell a story. hard choices have to be made. nevertheless, argo will be the version of what happened that most everyone remembers. this happens again and again in hollywood. the recent 50th anniversary of jfk s death saw oliver stone s 1991 film jfk back in theaters for a short time. a very controversial take on the events of the president s murder, rereleased to an audience of millions. all the presidents men, the list goes on and on, telling great stories on screen is one of 9 the things that america does best. when politics are involved, are we do disservice to history if we aren t totally faithful to it? still with us to talk about it, nick acachella and chris wilkinson, screenwriter for nixon, kate nocera and dave
no rules and most importantly no wrapping paper. most importantly these hats. they re all wearing them, i have to put this thing on now too. now i m one of them. we ll spin the wheel. we have it behind me. we ll see who our who we ll get assigned to a secret santa, go around the panel and give our gifts to whoever we land on. we have kate nocera, the height of her reporting year. i work this all the time. mike peska is back. so is reporter, columnist, writer, nick acachella. so thank you for doing this. we ll spin the whelm and see who our first gift recipient is. let s give this a good whirl. round and round it goes. it is going to stop on stops on the president of the united states. barack obama.
come on. the weather channel would call that a tie. well, anyone but the weather channel i guess would call that a tie. elizabeth warren is at 49.2 degrees. president obama is at 47.6 degrees. and so is senator kirsten gillibrand. ted cruz comes in at 46.8 degrees. chris christie is also on the cover of new york magazine this week in an article about the happy hothead. joining me now, the author of that new new york magazine piece, benjamin wallace wells, contributing editor for new york witt mrngz and nick acachella, editor and publisher of politifacts new jersey. benjamin wallace wells, what about this? what did you call him? the happy hothead. i didn t know hotheads were happy. well, this one certainly is. you know, this has been an interesting campaign to watch. the piece that i did is sort of an observational study of him on
the trail. and what he s running right now i think is an identity campaign. he s not running a traditional election campaign because he s up by 35 points. so what he s out to do, i think, is to convince the republican base nationally that its idea of populist could be expanded a little bit. so traditionally when we ve thought of a republican populist we ve thought of someone whose politics are very conservative, libertarian, fairly radical. chris christie has a very kind of populist way about him, a populist rhetoric, combines that with a very different politics. and i think he s sort of making a bet that, you know, this whole tea party moment that we ve seen is sort of ending and that, you know, you see it when he took on rand paul very directly over the last couple of weeks. and there s a kind of conservative populism that he can tap into a populism of the middle class. that can be powerful. nick acachella, everyone