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 On Tuesday, Christie will deliver his state of the state address,
potentially the biggest speech he'll make before announcing his
presidential intentions, a decision that could come by the end of
the month.
After a difficult year, Christie may "try to regain some momentum
and frame his tenure, both for the New Jersey audience as well as
the national audience," said Ben Dworkin, who heads a New Jersey
politics institute at Rider University.
Christie has been hounded by the so-called Bridgegate scandal and
related ongoing federal criminal probes, as well as controversy over
whether he should have gone to Texas for a Jan. 4 Dallas Cowboys
game, the trip paid for by team owner Jerry Jones.
The Cowboys are part owner of a company that does business with the
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency
Christie's former aides are accused of abusing in order to engineer
a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge as an alleged act of
political retribution against a local mayor.
 The bridge scandal "effectively made 2014 a giant missed
opportunity" for Christie, said Dworkin.
"Christie has cultivated an image of being the atypical politician,"
Dworkin said. "He is a reformer, he is able to get things done with
Democrats but still be a strong conservative. He doesn’t look like
or sound like anybody else out there.
"What issues like Bridgegate and the Jerry Jones gifts provide is an
opportunity for Christie's opponents to paint him as the opposite,
as a very typical politician.”
Polls have consistently shown former Florida Governor Jeb Bush ahead
of Christie in a potential Republican presidential primary. Voters
would also elect Democrat Hillary Clinton over Christie in the
general election, according to the most recent polls.
Christie is likely to use his state address to recite his
accomplishments last year, such as rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy.
His constituents may also listen to hear his plans on how to improve
an underfunded pension system, a transportation funding crisis,
sluggish economic growth and the fiscal meltdown of Atlantic City,
the once-strong East Coast gambling hub.
New Jersey has recovered only about half of the jobs it lost during
the recession, compared to well over 100 percent nationally and
nearly 200 percent for neighboring New York. Matters got worse on
Tuesday, when Mercedes-Benz announced that it would move its U.S.
headquarters from northern New Jersey to Atlanta, affecting about
1,000 jobs.
That loss comes after a year that saw roughly 8,000 jobs vanish with
the closing of four casinos in Atlantic City, an economic engine of
southern New Jersey.
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Also pressuring Christie will be the decision he made amid a revenue
crisis last year to cancel nearly $2.5 billion of contributions to
the state's already underfunded retirement system for public
employees. New accounting methods in November showed the system
funded at just 44 percent.
In last year's state of the state, Christie said bipartisan pension
changes he won in 2011 didn't go far enough, setting the stage for
his call a month later in his budget address for additional reforms.
Yet even now, he hasn't detailed or endorsed any specific new
proposals, like moving employees to a 401(k)-style plan, for
example.
Christie formed a pension study commission last year, but so far it
has produced one report without specific recommendations. Commission
Chairman Thomas Healey did not return a call seeking comment.
Competing for attention, and money, is the state's nearly insolvent
transportation fund. Currently, all of the gasoline taxes collected
in New Jersey goes to pay existing debt service costs instead of
funding new projects. The fund, which has nearly gone broke several
times, will run out of money on July 1 unless lawmakers find
additional funding.
One quick fix would be to raise the gas tax. At 14.5 cents a gallon,
New Jersey's tax hasn't been raised since the late 1980s, making it
one of the only low-tax bright spots for residents of a high-tax
state. Long-term, raising the gas tax alone likely won't be enough
to fix the problem.
"We're at a turning point," said Gordon MacInnes, president of the
left-leaning think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective. "Our greatest
economic asset, which is our location, is under threat because the
[fund] that pays for modernizing, expanding and rehabilitating our
transportation networks goes broke."
(Reporting by Hilary Russ. Editing by Megan Davies and John
Pickering)
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