When it comes time for Dear Leader to fit Chris Christie under it in 2013.

You see, Dear Gov. Christie made a big show of welcoming Dear Leader to New Jersey after the storm hit.  Squired him around, got his picture taken in the airplane and everything.  Other governors had sense enough to know that the last person in the entire world you need cluttering up a disaster area is the President of the United States of America.  No offense, Mr. President, but you make a pig’s breakfast of everyone’s life wherever you go.  It’s just part of your job.  So thank you very much for the concern but for God’s sake go play golf instead.

The reason why Chris Christie would go to such lengths?  He’s running for re-election next year, as a Republican of course.  His most likely opposition is Mayor Corey Booker, Democrat of Newark.  You’ll recall that Mayor Booker was the feller who blotted his copy book by pointing out that Dear Leader was full of shit for his sliming the private equity industry.  So he was publicly shamed by the national party and made to walk back his statement of the truth.  If Christie can get the White House not to throw its weight behind Booker, Christie’s got a chance — slender, to be sure — of making his way back to the governor’s mansion when it’s all over.

So Chris Christie gave Dear Leader the chance to play “president” all over the television screens, a week before the election.  And it worked.  As a reader at Instapundit calculated: 

In keeping with Professor Jacobson’s warning concerning the media’s “Operation Demoralize” campaign, already in full swing, have you noticed how the role of “Superstorm Sandy” in Obama’s win has now largely been buried by the mainstream media? Other than Chris Matthews’ now infamous praising of God for the political gift the storm provided to Obama, and some mention of the AP’s exit poll data showing 42% of those polled reported being positively influenced to vote for Obama based on his purported stellar handling of the emergency response to the storm, Superstorm Sandy has not found its way into many MSM election post mortems. The reason for that should be readily apparent. The mainstream media’s preferred narrative has predictably changed. Now, the Obama victory is being depicted as the result of America’s widespread disapproval and rejection of Republicans and their extremist, white-focused policies and ideology.

A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth. Suddenly, Chris Christie was someone to be listened to, ad nauseum, rather than being dismissed as a partisan Republican attack dog. However, with Obama’s re-election now safely in the bag, the MSM would prefer that Americans forget that a freak storm probably averted an Obama loss. Obviously, such a loss would entirely preempt “Operation Demoralize,” and the only thing the MSM enjoys more than helping elect Democrats is predicting doom and despair for Republicans.

“Operation Demoralize” completely falls apart if one considers just how close the margin of victory was for Obama in the four swing states that decided the election, and how Superstorm Sandy almost certainly moved enough votes from Romney to Obama to provide the election of victory. In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this U.S. presidential election was a two person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed “heckuva job” in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.

The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.

In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.

In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.

A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.

I want to emphasize that these are very small numbers of voters in relation to the overall number of votes cast in these states, and with such a high percentage of voters in the AP poll attributing their vote in large measure to Obama’s positive media coverage from the storm, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Obama loses the election, albeit narrowly, if Superstorm Sandy never happened. But for our illustrious media elites, the truth won’t do, not when such a grand opportunity for another anti-Republican hatchet job has presented itself. 

Now Gov. Christie waits for the payoff next year.

If I were Dear Gov. Christie I’d call up the NJDOT garage boys and order up a 5XL maintenance man jump suit, because otherwise he’s going to get grease all over him when Dear Leader shoves him under the bus next year.

Chris Christie can’t be that foolish.  He can’t be so naïve as to think that this dyed-in-the-wool Chicago thug politician whose very political essence is overt racialism and mountebankery is not going to put his back behind getting One of Him into that governor’s mansion.  Seriously; think about it.  Booker’s got to have ambitions that transcend New Jersey.  Is one of the most personally liked presidents in recent history going to be of assistance to him in achieving those ambitions, or not?  And the beauty is that, like Bill Clinton, Dear Leader will for decades to come be able to pop around and pull on an oar for Booker at opportune moments.  But Booker knows for a a certainty he won’t stir a finger unless Corey Booker as governor of New Jersey lines up just exactly right for Dear Leader’s purposes over the remaining three years of his second term. 

So, from Dear Leader’s perspective, who’s likely to prove the more pliant tool?  Chris Christie, white, big, blunt, and famously unafraid of stepping on anyone’s toes?  And did we mention he’s white?  Or Corey Booker, who’s “one of us,” dontcha know, who’s in fact a lot like what Dear Leader only pretends to be (i.e., competent and from all I hear, not crooked, and at least until he gets his chain jerked by the party bosses, sometimes willing to state the truth)?  Oh by the way, did I forget to mention that Chris Christie is white?

Dear Leader may have to get the off-road package installed to get his bus high enough off the ground to fit him, but you just watch:  Chris Christie’s slot under that bus has already been measured and chalked out on the pavement.

And that fool likely made him president again.  And for what?  What’s FEMA done in New Jersey that they haven’t in New York?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Anyone?  And in so doing assured that any post-gubernatorial ambitions he might have entertained within the Republican party just evaporated.  Maybe he never had them in the first place; for his sake I hope he didn’t.  Party apparatchiki have long memories, and as the numbers from last week continue to get parsed by the people whose evaluation of such numbers matter, Christie’s role in enabling the coming four years is going to become more, not less, prominent.

Update (21 Nov 12):  I’m not claiming to be clairvoyant or anything, but boy can I call ’em or what:  Hot Air has a report on the fall-out, as it stands now.  Money quote:  “Romney 2012 donors, many of whom were doubtless prospective Christie 2016 donors, are supposedly ‘furious.’ Two things here. One: While Christie will wisely and strenuously attempt to frame this as an argument over whether he was supposed to ‘do his job’ in the aftermath of a ferocious disaster, that’s a total red herring. The objection isn’t that he worked with Obama, it’s that he seemed bizarrely determined to lavish fulsome praise on the guy with election day bearing down.”