Can Christie Save the Republican Party?

New York: “We have never had a president as outwardly angry as Christie, but then this country has rarely been as angry as it is now. In the tea-party era, conservative anger has often been channeled by figures such as Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz into a hysteria over very abstract and inflated threats: health-care death panels, the national debt, the specter of a country overrun by illegal immigrants. Christie’s use of anger is very different: It is much more targeted, and therefore potentially much more useful.”

“What Christie is doing when he starts arguments with other Republicans-and it is telling that what looks very much like a presidential run has begun with a sequence of fights-is offering his party the chance to preserve its anger, while trading in its revolutionaries for a furious institutionalist… Christie is a small-craft warning of a human being; he is a rush of blood to the head; he is a bully. But the governor is something else, too, something that ­separates him from the nihilistic elements of his party and-maybe-gives him a chance to lead them. He is a believer.”