In the Right

From the very beginning, the New Jersey Republican gubernatorial primary contest has been Chris Christie's race to lose.

For at least the past two weeks, he's been losing it.

And if we wake up on the morning of June 3rd to the news that Lonegan is the GOP nominee for governor of New Jersey, today may be the day that goes down as the day Lonegan catapulted himself past Christie for good.

Thirteen days ago, new Quinnipiac University Polling Institute numbers showed that the gap between the front-running Christie and his conservative challenger Lonegan was in single digits -- Christie led Lonegan by just 46-37 percent among likely GOP primary voters.

The Christie campaign shrugged off those numbers, pointing worried friends and allies instead to a wildly different set of numbers from a polling outfit called Strategic Vision.

According to Strategic Vision, Christie's lead over Lonegan was a much more robust 40-15 percent.

That the Strategic Vision numbers were bogus was seemingly irrelevant to the Christie high command; they worked as a needed momentary distraction.

But two days later, the Christie campaign's feigned confidence was exposed as a charade, when the campaign launched an attack on Lonegan.

The fact that the attack came in the form of a radio ad was telling -- a radio ad takes about two days to write, produce, ship, slot, and pay for.

That means that even as the Christie campaign's spokesmen were publicly telling its supporters on Wednesday, through the news media, that there was nothing to worry about, in reality, the campaign was working fast to produce and air the attack ad by Friday.

Launching the attack against Lonegan was a critical strategic error. Campaigns that are confident they are winning don't launch attacks against their opponents -- especially against opponents whose supporters they hope to win over after winning a contested primary campaign.

And it's a strict rule in politics that a campaign never "shoots down" (attacks a campaign it is leading), but instead "shoots up" (aims its guns at the campaign it is trailing) -- unless there's no other way to stop the trailing campaign from overtaking it.

For the past two weeks, the Christie campaign has played right into Lonegan's hands. After making the fundamental strategic error of deciding to attack Lonegan, the Christie campaign then began a series of tactical errors.

For instance, after the radio ad counterattack, the Christie campaign decided to use the candidate himself to attack Lonegan on the tax front.

Using talking points that could have been cribbed from the state's Democratic Party headquarters, Christie began attacking Lonegan's proposal for a major tax overhaul -- a state-level flat tax.

Christie argued that Lonegan's tax reform would raise taxes on a huge chunk of New Jersey residents who don't currently pay income taxes to the state.

It would. By a little.

By vastly expanding the tax base, the reform proposal would allow the state to lower the top marginal tax rate substantially, and lower rates for middle-class taxpayers a bit.

And those lower marginal rates at the top would provide the incentives necessary to get New Jerseyans once again to save, invest, and produce, rather than leave the Garden State as they had been doing in droves.

So while a lot of New Jersey taxpayers who do not currently pay income taxes to the state would have to start paying a little, a relatively few taxpayers who pay the bulk of New Jersey's state income taxes would see their tax burden fall a great deal, and an awful lot of middle-class taxpayers who pay a lot in income taxes would see their taxes go down a bit.

Now, you can have an argument over the flat tax on policy grounds, and you can even have an argument over which flat tax plan is better, on policy grounds.

But on political grounds, the Christie campaign has totally misplayed its hand.

First, by attacking Lonegan over Lonegan's tax plan, they are fighting on Lonegan's turf. The Christie campaign is letting the Lonegan campaign dictate the terms of the campaign agenda.

Winning campaigns control the campaign discussion; losing campaigns respond to the other guys. So in attacking Lonegan over his tax plan, the Christie campaign is playing a losing hand.

Second, while the Christie campaign appears to be long on endorsements and county lines -- the old standbys of establishment Republican campaigns in New Jersey -- it appears to be decidedly short on policy wonks.

Consequently, there doesn't appear to be anyone at Christie headquarters to actually crunch the numbers on the Lonegan tax reform proposal and look at them from a political angle.

As a result, the Christie campaign apparently didn't realize that the two groups affected by Lonegan's tax plan have very different characteristics:

• The ones who are going to have their taxes raised don't vote in GOP primaries.
• The ones who are going to see their taxes lowered do.

In other words, Lonegan's plan has the added political virtue of being targeted right at the people who tend to vote in GOP primary elections.

Third, Christie skipped a candidate forum over the weekend, and sent instead his campaign chairman, state Sen. Joe Kyrillos.

Although the stated reason for Christie's absence -- he was attending the first communion of one of his children -- is perfectly valid, coming as it did just as the primary campaign was ramping up gave Lonegan an opportunity to intimate that Christie was ducking debates.

Finally, because there are no movement conservatives in the high command of the Christie campaign, there is no one there who understands the significance to the movement conservatives who show up to vote in GOP primaries of one Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher -- AKA Joe the Plumber -- and, as a result, no one who understands how significant will be Wurzelbacher's appearance today endorsing Lonegan.

The Christie campaign's response?

They're bringing in former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- still popular among Garden State Republicans -- for a press conference call where Christie and Giuliani will "discuss our state's job-killing taxes, mismanagement of the budget, and candidate proposals to raise taxes on 70 percent of New Jerseyans," according to the campaign release.

In other words, they're bringing in a guy best known for his leadership response to the 9/11 attacks to trash the other guy's economic plan.

And the larger problem is, a press conference call provides no visuals for television.

An actual appearance by a media celebrity like Joe the Plumber, on the other hand, could generate coverage from both New York and Philadelphia TV stations, and will most certainly generate loads of coverage from New Jersey 101.5, the state's biggest talk radio station -- one of the key places where Garden State conservatives get their news.

So score today's dueling events for Lonegan, too.

The good news for Christie is he's got six times as much money to spend over the next 28 days as does Lonegan.

The bad news is, his campaign has shown no evidence yet that it knows how to spend its money wisely, on either a strategic or a tactical level.

Four weeks from today, New Jersey Republicans will go to the polls to choose their standard-bearer against Jon Corzine.

If Chris Christie doesn't turn things around, that Republican nominee is likely to be Steve Lonegan -- and Christie will have no one to blame but himself.