Joe Scarborough Beating the Drum for Chris Christie

To paraphrase Mark Twain, Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough, writing in Politico, warns that reports of the death of Chris Christie’s potential 2016 presidential run have been much exaggerated.

Scarborough notes Christie was once seen as the GOP’s brightest rising star in 2013, ignoring the vehement opposition to him within the party after his infamous embrace of Barack Obama just before the 2012 election. Scarborough asserts Christie has been dismissed by such MSM outlets as the New York Times and Washington Post as an out-of-touch has-been, again ignoring the fact that most of the GOP despises both those institutions with a passion.

Comparing what he believes is the premature burial of his favorite governor with the premature hoopla for the Rudy Giuliani candidacy in 2008, the Morning Joe host states, “all the chattering about the New Jersey governor’s failings means about as much as the kudos Rudy Giuliani was receiving at this point in the 2008 election cycle.” Taking a potshot at Giuliani, Scarborough writes that “America’s Mayor” was “not up to the challenges of the process required to become America’s president.” But, he adds, “the same Bill Clinton who Sen. Bob Kerrey and many others predicted would be ‘opened up like a rusty can’ by the glare of a presidential campaign staggered through the snows of New Hampshire in 1992 with sex scandals, draft controversies, and a slew of other challenges chasing him down to his supposed political death. He went on to be the first Democrat to get elected twice since FDR.”

No mention of the fact that if H. Ross Perot hadn’t run in 1992, we would have been talking abut two terms for George H. W. Bush.

Scarborough, one of the Establishment Boys, breathlessly writes of one of the chief Establishment governors, “All the missteps from Trenton to 10 Downing Street won’t mean a thing if Christie hits it out of the park in his first few New Hampshire town-hall meetings. If he does, you can bet the star-maker machinery will slowly start churning his way and we will excitedly start talking about ‘The Christie Comeback.’”

This isn’t the first time Scarborough has trumpeted Christie’s praises; on November 2013 Scarborough attacked the Tea Party and defended Christie by saying, “Now I can ask the question: Who in the hell can look at Chris Christie and say ‘Oh he’s just like [Democratic Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid. Those people can’t be reasoned with. They are the RINOs. They don’t understand what it means to be a Republican. They don’t understand what it means to be a conservative. They don’t understand what it’s like to win elections. Not national elections. They don’t get it.”