Christie's trip to Iowa hints of White House ambition

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa - Gov. Christie drew roars of laughter from 800 Iowa Republican activists here Monday night when he hit the high notes of his battles with New Jersey Democrats, a red-ink budget, and especially the state's largest teachers union.

Speaking at a fund-raiser for Republican gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad, Christie said he campaigned against school budgets in communities where teachers would not take a pay freeze or agree to pay 1.5 percent of their wages for health care.

He drew his strongest signs of Iowa Republican approval when, using a whiny voice, he asked his audience to consider what it would be like to have a child come home from school and say, "Mom, Dad, I can't study. I can't work. My grades are suffering because Mrs. Smith, she's not getting her pay raise this year. And it's worse. She actually has to pay 1.5 percent of her salary for health benefits."

Raising his voice to a full-throated whine, Christie, still in character, added, "I cannot focus! I cannot focus with that knowledge. Mom, Dad, stop the madness!"

Returning to his normal voice, but with his eyes wide open and a grin on his face, he said, "This is the garbage I have to listen to in New Jersey. And you wonder why I'm in Iowa."

So went the Iowa stop of Christie's blunt-talk express, a national tour where he is stumping for Republican candidates in a year when the party is likely to pick up governorships and seats in Congress.

Christie was here to support Branstad at a fund-raiser at the Hy-Vee Conference Center. Branstad, a former four-term Iowa governor, called the event "the biggest and most successful fund-raising event I've ever had in all my races for governor." His staff declined to say how much money was raised, but the crowd seemed to get its money's worth.

Tom Ovel, a photographic-equipment manufacturer, came from Waterloo specifically to see Christie.

"I jumped at the chance to see Gov. Christie," he said. "I've been following him since he got elected. He's the kind of politician who [on the campaign trail] said what he was going to do, and when he got into office, he went and did it."

A trio of Republican women from Des Moines said they liked the Christie style. Toni Nesbit said she had watched several videos of Christie, particularly the one where he took on the teachers' union, saying teachers were trying to get students to persuade their parents to vote for school budgets.

"He tells it like it is," she said. "We like that."

Earlier in the day, Christie took a swing through Wisconsin, campaigning in Waukesha for gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker.

The national tour, aimed at pumping up Republican candidates in battleground areas, also includes stops in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland. During a California visit, Christie caught the nation's eye with a dose of Jersey-guy chivalry when he stepped between a heckler and gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.

But the visit that's turning heads is the one to Iowa, scene of the nation's first presidential caucuses. Despite Christie's frequent declarations that he is not considering a run for president, those in the know doubt he came here for the fall foliage.

"The fact that he's doing this sends a signal," said David Yepsen, the former dean of Iowa political reporters who now heads the University of Southern Illinois Paul Simon Public Policy Center.

"I call it a 'deal me in' kind of appearance," Yepsen said, adding that Christie is signaling, "I'm not necessarily going to play, I just want to make sure you have a seat at the table for me if I do."

Rising-star politicians like Christie don't go to Iowa for tourism, he said. Other analysts agree.

"You want to show your little pheasant tail, spread those feathers out, and have some people say, 'That's a good-looking pheasant,' " said Iowa State University political scientist Steffen Schmidt. "You don't ever want to say, 'I'm running for president,' this early out, because in Iowa, that's considered presumptuous and arrogant."

Branstad is leading Democratic Gov. Chet Culver by 19 points, according to a Des Moines Register poll released Sept. 26. His campaign is hoping Christie will help him finish strong.

Like other governors, Culver has made unpopular budget cuts. But unlike New Jersey, Iowa has little debt, and its state budget has not been as ravaged by severe revenue dips.

Christie is the darling of his party, especially of the Republican Governors Association, which funded ads to help him capture the governor's office in 2009 and this year released a video declaring him a man who knows how to win in a blue state.

"If you look at where he's been campaigning, it's been in Democratic-leaning states or states with Democratic governors," said his political consultant, Mike Duhaime, who ran presidential campaigns for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.). More important, Duhaime said, "he's shown he can govern effectively in a Democratic state with a Democratic legislature."

The narrative fueling Christie's rising Republican star is imbued with things party loyalists want to hear. He won a blue state. Once in office, he cut a burgeoning state deficit, called out unions, cut money for Planned Parenthood clinics, and held his fights with a Democratic-controlled legislature in public.

Christie showed the same combativeness before a crowd of about 400 in Los Angeles on the first leg of his campaign trip. A heckler called Whitman, the former head of eBay, "Arnold in a skirt," a reference to outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Christie rose from his seat, got in the heckler's face and told him, "It's people who raise their voices and yell and scream like you who are dividing this country. We're here to bring this country together," according to videos seen online around the country.

Christie has been careful to attend to New Jersey during the road show and tuck in high-profile announcements. In Chicago, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat. The two were announcing a $100 million grant from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg to repair Newark's dysfunctional public school system. In between Ohio and this trip to Iowa and Wisconsin, he was in New Jersey to say he would expand charter schools and set new pay and performance standards for public school teachers.

These are just the sort of images - an Oprah hug and tough talking to a heckler - that propel a political career. No one, not even Christie, knows for sure what the trip to Iowa could mean to his political career, but it plants ideas.

Rutgers University political scientist Dave Redlawsk, who ran the Hawkeye Poll at the University of Iowa and has written a book on the 2008 Iowa caucuses, said: "People put ideas in these guys' heads in general, and most governors and every senator wakes up in the morning, looks in a mirror, and sees a president."