For Chris Christie, the truth hurts: Column

The only thing worse than a lying politician is one who tells the truth. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the latter, or at least he pretends to be.

Announcing his presidential candidacy on Tuesday, Christie vowed to speak the truth. "I mean what I say and I say what I mean, and that's what America needs right now," he said, presumably meaning it.

Many of the truths Christie evoked on Tuesday are indisputable. "I became governor six years ago" (True). "We have a president in the Oval Office" (True). In the not-a-news-flash file: "Both parties have failed our country." He also pointed out that "compromise" is not "a dirty word." Indeed, one can even say it on network television.

Christie is all about telling the truth — or, rather, all about telling people he will tell them the truth. He promised "a campaign of big ideas and hard truths," and reminded the audience of his truth track record: "As governor I've never wavered from telling you the truth as I see it."

What qualifies as truths in Christie's lexicon are mostly bromides, the utterance of which he considers an act of courage. He notified the crowd, "We just need to have the courage to stand up and say, 'Enough!'" This requires no courage at all, only functioning legs and the ability to enunciate two syllables.

"What are those truths?" Christie asked. "We have to acknowledge that our government isn't working anymore for us." This is a platitude, not a truth, but Christie still wants credit for telling it.

If Christie intends on telling the truth, rather than merely talking about telling it, he is courting disaster. In politics, telling the truth is a liability, not an asset.

Richard Nixon's claim not to be a crook, though absurd and disingenuous, was shrewd compared to the alternative. It would have been far worse politically if he had said, "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. And just so you know, I am."

Jimmy Carter, who promised never to lie to the American people, surely wasn't lying when he confessed to having "looked on a lot of women with lust." This was simply an acknowledgement of biological reality, but it survives as perhaps Carter's most notorious statement.

Walter Mondale, upon accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, spoke the truth when he said he would raise taxes. The result? He won one state out of 50.

Contrary to myth, Americans don't dislike pandering. They dislike blatant pandering, which is Hillary Clinton's specialty. Once a proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, she now is equivocal. She was for the Iraq war when it was popular and against it when it became unpopular. During her first Senate campaign, she claimed she had "always been a Yankees fan." She reminds me of the woman in Coming to America who, when asked what kind of music she likes, answers, "Whatever kind of music you like."

Christie is adopting the opposite strategy, willing, even eager, to tell you that your favorite band sucks. He vowed to run "a campaign without spin or without pandering or focus-group-tested answers" — a line that polls well in focus groups. Telling voters you will not pander to them is itself a form of pandering. Voters want to be told the truth, not what they want to hear, unless the truth is different from what they want to hear.

"You're going to get what I think whether you like it or not, or whether it makes you cringe every once in a while or not," Christie said. But the goal of a presidential candidate is to get elected, not to express cringe-inducing thoughts. Politicians who do the latter lose elections. Remember Todd Akin?

If Christie has thoughts, he failed to elucidate them on Tuesday. Instead, he clarified his approach to Q&A. "When I'm asked a question," he averred, "I'm going to give the answer to the question that's asked." Needless to say, he doesn't always do this. When asked about immigration last year, Christie said, "I'm not going to discuss a complicated issue like immigration here in Marion, Iowa." For reasons left unexplained, the residents of Marion, Iowa, are precluded from hearing the truth about immigration.

Christie said he "will not worry about what is popular but what is right." Voters prefer politicians who do the right thing to politicians who do whatever is popular, except when doing the right thing happens to be unpopular. If Christie doesn't know this already, he will learn soon.

Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism .

In addition to its own editorials, Paste BN publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors . To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page .