The Jersey touch

Polls have cast a harsh light on his presidential chances, but Gov. Christie will try to win over early-primary state voters with a Jersey-tested tool: the town-hall meeting.

Christie, who has held 134 such meetings in his home state, will hold two this week in New Hampshire, where he also plans to announce a national entitlement reform proposal.

That subject dovetails with what Christie has framed at New Jersey town halls as confronting hard truths about the state's public worker pension system.

"If we continue to say yes to everyone, and everyone says, 'I'm entitled to this and I'm entitled to that, I want, I want, I want, I deserve,' you know it just doesn't work that way," Christie said recently in Union County. "The fact is, I didn't run for this job to be the prom king."

The message could sound similar in New Hampshire, where his political action committee has branded this week's events as part of a "Tell It Like It Is" series.

Political analysts say Christie needs to meet face-to-face with voters in New Hampshire to gain ground in a crowded Republican field.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul have already announced 2016 presidential campaigns, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is expected to enter the race this week. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush are among those seen as contenders.

Christie might not decide on a run until June, he said recently. Still looming is the prospect of indictments in the George Washington Bridge scandal.

Polls, while early, show Christie trailing. A national Wall Street Journal/NBC poll last month found that 57 percent of GOP primary voters said they could not support Christie, a ranking among the most unfavorable in the poll.

"Christie's now had prolonged, consistent, bad presidential press. If he was a stock, it has fallen steeply off its high," said Steve Schmidt, who advised Arizona Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. But "that doesn't mean you wouldn't want to be buying that stock right now."

Christie is in "a much better place" than McCain was in 2007, Schmidt said. By that summer, the senator's campaign was running out of money.

And McCain was drawing a lackluster reception. "We couldn't even get a crowd at a town-hall meeting," said Steve Duprey, the Republican national committeeman for New Hampshire, who traveled with McCain. He recalled touring American Legion halls: "We'd get some 10, 20 veterans, and we'd roust everybody out of the bar."

In New Jersey, Christie can draw a (generally friendly) audience of several hundred.

Persistence paid off for McCain, who held 100 town halls and won New Hampshire's Republican primary, topping Mitt Romney.

"Unless you make that personal connection . . . you can't win New Hampshire," Duprey said. "You need to campaign like you're running for the state Senate."

Strategists consider New Hampshire a key state for Christie, presenting a better shot at success in the primaries than in the early-voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, where social issues have traditionally held more sway.

"It's very difficult to see how he would make it all the way to the end if he didn't do well here," said Tom Rath, a longtime Republican strategist in New Hampshire who advised Romney's campaigns, among others.

While town-hall meetings are standard practice for candidates in New Hampshire, "in a race that is as close as this is . . . it becomes a very important differentiator," Rath said. "It puts a real personality to the candidate that's different than what paid media produces."

In New Jersey, Christie's town-hall meetings aren't just forums with constituents: They are political theater starring Christie.

In Monmouth County last week, many people stood to applaud Christie as he entered. The governor ran through his opening remarks - this year and last, on pension and benefits changes - and slipped in a favorite anecdote about a lesson from his mother.

"There's no money tree in the backyard," he said, arguing that the state didn't have the money to catch up on past skipped payments into its long-underfunded pension system, though without mentioning that he had signed a law several years ago committing to do that.

Near the end of the meeting, a Girl Scout asked Christie what he would do to change Washington if he ran for president.

"People don't talk to each other anymore," he replied. The president and Congress have "to work with each other more . . . because it's harder to hate up close."

Within hours, Christie's staff had e-mailed out a video clip of the interaction, titled: "Girl Scout to Gov. Christie: What Would You Change About D.C.?"

Since Christie took office in 2010, his staff has spread such clips via social media, helping take his blunt-talking persona national. The most popular video on his YouTube account - a nine-minute clip of him dismissing a teacher's argument during a 2010 town hall - has more than 1.3 million views.

Christie's town halls have provided "a very successful marketing opportunity," said Patrick Murray, a political analyst at Monmouth University. "What's interesting now is how he's going to switch gears when he goes up to New Hampshire."

At the same time, some of Christie's most notorious moments have occurred during his interactions with crowds. Last fall, he got national attention for ordering a Hurricane Sandy protester to "sit down and shut up." He once called a former Navy SEAL an "idiot."

While that tendency could pose a liability for Christie - he "can't fly off the handle" in New Hampshire, Murray said - Christie's style bears some resemblance to McCain, who "would always look for a foil in the crowd," said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman. "Somebody in the audience with whom he could disagree."

Many of the questions Christie fields at New Jersey meetings involve local concerns - alimony laws, services for children with disabilities, estate taxes. New Hampshire voters will seek his positions on national issues, Murray said.

Strategists say Christie won't be able to skirt questions as he did last year when asked by reporters about immigration, replying that he would lay out a position if and when he ran for president.

"Everybody up here gets the joke," Rath said. "He's obviously not coming up here to buy maple syrup."

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