Review: 'Double Down,' on the 2012 election
By now, everyone knows that Mitt Romney's inner circle was righteously peeved at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for spending the final days of the 2012 presidential race arm-in-arm with President Obama as they toured the Jersey coastline after its thrashing by Hurricane Sandy. The buddy-buddy act boxed Romney out of national media coverage for days while lending the president some bipartisan street cred.
But it wasn't just the storm. Christie had rankled Romney's team throughout the campaign: He held back his endorsement as long as possible, flirted with big-shot GOP donors who begged him to jump into the race and used his prime-time address at the Republican National Convention to puff up his Garden State record — without mentioning Romney once.
For Romney's aides, dealing with Christie's overbearing team was about as pleasurable as a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The book lacks the made-for-Hollywood scenes of "Game Change": Elizabeth Edwards ripping off her shirt to reveal her mastectomy scars in an emotional tarmac confrontation with her cheating husband, or anything Palin-related. But there's still click-bait aplenty: Obama meditating on drone strikes and telling his aides that he's "really good at killing people"; Christie's raging temper; Romney adviser Stuart Stevens vomiting backstage after Clint Eastwood's performance art in Tampa; Romney's fascination with fat people, including his habit of ribbing male campaign staffers about dating overweight women; George W. Bush calling Rick Perry, his gubernatorial successor in Texas, "a chicken-[expletive] guy"; Obama's team secretly polling and focus-grouping the notion of replacing Joe Biden with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Democratic ticket; and so on. It's a book that will launch a thousand listicles.
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