Kevin Riordan: The Chris Christie Experience - yours online now
Like Ralph Lauren, Sean Jean, or Snookie, the Chris Christie brand is much more than a label. It's a lifestyle. A total experience.
Like Ralph Lauren, Sean Jean, or Snookie, the Chris Christie brand is much more than a label.
It's a lifestyle. A total experience.
And it's available at www.governorchristiestore.com.
Well in advance of Christmas, or Christie for President, New Jersey Republicans are merchandising their party's rising star with a line of casual clothes and action-packed accessories.
Why clog up cable with yet another Jersey reality show, or a Sarah Palin's Alaska ripoff?
Why risk a diss from Karl Rove?
Christie partisans are playing it safe, hawking hoodies and T-shirts (yes, some are XXL). Prices start at $19.95 and proceeds benefit the GOP.
Travel unnecessities
Party spokesfolks say they opened the virtual shop due to popular demand. So don't look for potentially unpopular travel-themed items, which could refresh voter memories of Christie's high-flying career as a U.S. attorney or his coast-to-coast campaign for other GOP candidates.
Don't expect to find the governor's "tool kits" for cash-strapped municipal governments, either.
A jet-setter suggesting the rest of us fly coach? Not the sort of image that bolsters a brand during a Great Recession. Even a tough-talking YouTube superstar can't always sell what the people don't want.
While it makes sense to limit inventory, quintessential Christieana is strangely missing from the online CCMart.
Where are the lumps of coal for schoolteachers and superintendents? The dead-duck figurines for the horse-racing industry? The quantitative easings (let's call them tax breaks) for millionaires?
Oh, right. Christie has already delivered those presents!
Books, CDs, and DVDs also are, lamentably, out of stock.
The governor's bible du jour - Global Warming: Myth, Conspiracy, or Socialist/Liberal Plot? - is nowhere to be found. Nor can one pick up A Plan to Eliminate Family Planning for Those Who May Need It Most.
Same goes for another apparent holy book, Making New Jersey More Like Ancient Sparta, a how-to for leaving unwanteds like affordable housing and New Jersey Network on the hillside to die. Also MIA: the long-awaited CD box set of Born to Run (for President) and a DVD special edition of Liar, Liar, autographed by Bret Schundler.
Opening some bricks-and-mortar CCMarts would provide a bona fide economic stimulus to places like Burlington Center, Cherry Hill's Garden State Pavilions, and the Route 42 corridor in Washington Township.
A blue-chip, red-state, upscale tenant like All Things Chris! also would fit nicely in that strange "this is not a state takeover" zone the governor envisions to save the Atlantic City casinos. (As for the rest of the town, consult the aforementioned Sparta book.)
Across the store aisles
A Cherry Hill CCMart could occupy the same strip as Camden County Democratic headquarters, the spiritual home of George E. Norcross 3d. Such bipartisan proximity might even inspire the two party big guys to friend (if not Friend) each other, while creating an across-the-aisle market for Christie coffee mugs ($9.95).
A Burlington store would make a nice swearing-in gift for incoming U.S. Rep. Jon Runyan and would bookend the mega-boost Christie provided the Republican neophyte.
And a Washington Township store would be convenient for semi-friends of Chris, such as the Legislature's top Democrat, Gloucester County labor leader Stephen Sweeney.
Perhaps the governor could visit his stores and give us regular folks the actual, not virtual, Chris Christie Experience!
I do shudder to think of our governor shouting "don't touch my junk" to people who mess up his merchandise.
Unless, of course, they want to buy it.