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Welcome back to hardball. chris christie s old empire continues to crumble. the new york times is reporting that paul nunziato, the head of the port authority police union who says the phony traffic study was his idea is now stepping aside from the union s day-to-day operations. that s according to a person briefed on the matter. in a statement nunziato has asked one of his deputies to take a more active role. in other words the story is true. so where s christie? yesterday christie amped up his damage control efforts at a town hall in a part of the state that s been friendly to him in the past. what caught people s attention there, particularly reporters covering the event, was the abrupt change in the governor s public personality. the new york times said, quote, the man who once commanded these rooms just by walking into them seemed unmistakably mortal. the washington post said it was nothing like christie s ....
The reaction to his doing that for whitney houston and the awful names people called people dealing with drug addiction. he talked about it as being a disease, and these people need to be helped. that was when i saw the empathetic, more real human down to earth chris christie than the larger than life bullying chris christie that i dealt with on air, and who we have come to know through all the scenes that we have seen of him at town hall meetings and radio introduce. what is the more important part of him, the part that is effective in politics or the part that is charming to you? well, look, the thing that is happening right now is politically speaking what chris christie needs to do. he is engulfed in scandal. his administration is engulfed in scandal. and the number one thing he can do to help himself politically is to look like he is acting normally, that he is going about the business of being governor, of tending to the needs of the people of his state. and yeah, he was ther ....
At the same time, town halls have always been an important part of building our perception about chris christie. the clips you showed us just now initially contributed to perception of him as very much a forthright kind of a tough leader. some people even at the time did use the term bully. but now the town hall that we saw yesterday, and he is going to have another one in the coming week or so, you know, his people are sort of looking at this as an opportunity to restore a bit of normalcy to the christie administration, to the governor who what really been besieged by this scandal since the very beginning of 2014. so while perhaps certainly a different chris christie than we ve seen in previous environments, it s sort of in the view of some of his supporters an opportunity to show that he is taking steps to be back in the game. i m still waiting to see what is in all the e-mails. i want to know everything, because this case is getting real. absolutely. if chris christie was test ....
Meet reporters or commentators, anybody that might make them look bad or worse. that s not really a good way to judge a politician, by the way he treats a reporter, it s been my experience. correct. you got to ask around. you got to do a little reporting to find out what they re like when you re not watching. so my question to you, the real christie is the one that was dancing around the floor the other day with the 3-year-old, or in fact is he the guy who put together the team of wildstein and baroni and bridget kelly and stepien, and all these people who think it s the business of the government of new jersey to punish opponents? chris, it s both. look, i m one of those reporters whose gotten into an on-air tussle with governor christie. but what people didn t see was what happened off camera when he complimented me on a piece that i had written giving him a compliment for putting the flags at half-staff when whitney houston died. and after our on-air altercation, i thanked him ....
Days. not the dark old nixon of old. so is this going to work? well, what we saw yesterday in the town hall, certainly in stark contrast to the way we have seen governor christie really over the last couple of years. certainly more subdued. we didn t see much of that new jersey bravado that he has often exuded before and certainly displayed that softer side. at the same time the event seemed to serve as a bit of a reprieve from the really tough 2014 that he had. he wasn t presented with real tough questions. that offered a little space to show the more empathetic side that comes as we have seen all the reports that are suggesting and raising questions about whether his administration is taking a bit of a bullying approach. you know, the old question, jonathan, you ve been around long enough to know this, i think the difference between politicians in public and often the public version is the one we get. uh-huh. they like us all. they re so friendly when they ....