Imus and Gov. Christie "Go There" About Teachers, Disneyworld, and President Obama

People professing to be fanatical fans of anything—from Imus in the Morning to Bruce Springsteen—make the I-Man nervous, a sentiment he expressed at Imus on Broadway a few nights ago, making specific reference to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose attendance at more than 100 Bruce concerts Imus deemed “stupid.”  Unbeknownst to Imus, E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt was in the audience that night.
 
“Now who’s stupid?” Christie said today in his usual bombastic manner. 
 
A few days ago, Christie made news in his State of the State address by taking on the teachers’ unions in New Jersey, though in his view, there’s not much to argue about.
 
“I don’t understand why teaching is the only profession left in America where there’s no reward for excellence, and there’s no penalty for failure,” he said. While unions were initially created to prevent political hiring and firing of teachers and to ensure academic freedom of speech, according to Christie, they have morphed into a totally different beast.
 
“What it’s become now is just an absolute insurance of a job for life, after you’ve been teaching for three years, with no chance to fire anybody, even if they turn out to be awful teachers,” he said.
 
The changes he’d like to see within the unions would reward excellent teachers, and get rid of the worst ones, which, according to a Gates Foundation study, would improve student performance. Not surprisingly, Christie has little patience for the argument that the system can’t change because this is how it’s always been, or because tenure attracts good people to what are essentially low-paying jobs.
 
“I don’t think that is the way we should be picking who trains the next generation of great Americans,” Christie said. “Because there won’t be a next generation of great Americans if that’s the way we do it.”
 
Though he easily doles out the flack, Christie caught some lately over his decision to remain on vacation in, of all places, Disneyworld during last month’s blizzard in New Jersey. He was unwilling to admit he was wrong, because he firmly believes he was not.
 
“I would not have left if I thought we didn’t have a plane in place, and the people in place that could get the snow cleared in New Jersey,” Christie said. “And you did not hear in New Jersey what you heard here in New York. The job got done. People elected me to get the job done, not to get on the back of a snow plow for a photo op.”
 
And his reason for not canceling the trip—“My first job is always going to be as a father and a husband,” he said—sounded way less trite once Christie explained it to Imus, who immediately felt bad.
 
But that didn’t stop him from pointing out that during the 2003 New York City blackout, Dick Grasso, who was visiting the Imus Ranch at the time and was also head of the New York Stock Exchange, jumped on the next plane back to New York to manage the situation. On the other hand, David Komansky, a former bigwig at Merrill Lynch who was also at the Ranch that day, “went and took a nap.”
 
Leading Christie to conclude that he fell somewhere in between Grasso and Komansky in his handling of the snowstorm, a statement he probably did not think he’d be making when he woke up this morning.
 
A notoriously straight shooter, Christie, a Republican whose views obviously differ from President Obama’s on many issues, acknowledged that he was proud of the President’s performance at last night’s memorial service in Tucson, Arizona, where six people were killed and 14 wounded in a shooting outside a Safeway last Saturday.
 
Should the level of discourse in this country actually change as a result of this horrific incident, Imus believes Obama’s speech yesterday went a long way toward achieving that end.
 
“It’s what a President is supposed to do,” Christie chimed in, much to Imus’s delight. Later, however, he lost all credibility by insisting New York Jets Coach Rex Ryan should be a guest on this program.
 
“J-E-T-S baby!” Christie squealed with delight. “Jets! Jets! Jets!”
 
-Julie Kanfer