Jon Corzine: The man with no shame

By Jennifer J. Foster

From “Corzine points spotlight at Christie’s weight” in The New York Times:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once.

In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones that Mr. Christie “threw his weight around” to avoid getting traffic tickets.

In the ugly New Jersey contest for governor, Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie have traded all sorts of shots, over mothers and mammograms, loans and lying. But now, Mr. Corzine’s campaign is calling attention to his rival’s corpulence in increasingly overt ways.

Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

Meanwhile, Mr. Corzine, 62, is conspicuously running in 5- and 10-kilometer races almost every weekend, as he did last Saturday and Sunday, underscoring his athleticism and readiness for the physical demands of another term — and raising doubts about Mr. Christie’s.

Corzine goes on to shrug off any link between his new ads and Christie’s weight. (Note reporter David M. Halbfinger’s trying-so-hard-to-be-wry characterization of that dismissal: Corzine “tries to make light of such suggestions.“ Ha, ha, David; very funny. Not really.)

For his part, Christie, who—like millions of Americans—has struggled with his weight for most of his life, is simply asking Corzine for a little bit of dignity.

Chris Christie may be overweight.

But it’s Jon Corzine who’s disgusting.