Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has built a remarkable brand in Republican politics around a simple message: that his bluster and brashness, grating as they might be, were driven by a desire to transcend partisan rancor and petty politics in the service of the public good.
He would never let himself engage, he once pledged, in the “type of deceitful political trickery that has gone on in this state for much too long.”
But embarrassing revelations about his office’s role in shutting down some access lanes to the George Washington Bridge now imperil that carefully cultivated image. They suggest that the same elbows-out approach that the Christie administration brought to policy battles at the State House may have been deployed for a much less noble end — punishing an entire borough for its mayor’s sin of not embracing the governor’s re-election campaign.
For Mr. Christie, the timing of the blossoming scandal is dreadful, disrupting a highly anticipated plan to present the popular governor to the national electorate as a no-nonsense, bipartisan balm to a deeply divided federal government.
Document: Emails Between Top Christie Aides and Port Authority Officials
The usually verbose and swaggering Mr. Christie, who once mocked questions from reporters about the abrupt closing of lanes to the bridge, seemed at a loss for how to respond on Wednesday.
As the drip-drip of internal documents intensified, he hunkered down in his Trenton office, canceling his sole public event, postponing long-planned interviews with local reporters and waiting seven hours before issuing a written statement expressing his own anger over the matter.
But by the end of the day, both Democratic and Republican leaders were seizing on the case’s growing links to the governor’s office, zeroing in on crude emails in which one of the governor’s top deputies and a high-level Christie appointee at the Port Authority seemed to celebrate their role in creating gridlock for residents of Fort Lee, N.J.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Christie said he would hold a news conference at 11 a.m. to address the controversy.
Despite Mr. Christie’s claims to the contrary, many saw an inescapable link to the temperamental governor, whose emotional outbursts at those who challenge him in public are a hallmark of his governing style.
Several leading conservatives, long suspicious of Mr. Christie’s allegiance to their cause, seemed eager to pounce. “The point of the story is that Christie will do payback,” Rush Limbaugh said on his popular conservative radio show. “If you don’t give him what he wants, he’ll pay you back.”
The episode is tricky for Mr. Christie and his aides. His cantankerous manner and independent streak are essential to his White House ambitions; advisers view them as an asset in early primary states like New Hampshire that have a history of embracing blunt-talking politicians.
Now there is a new worry: that what once seemed like a refreshing forcefulness may come off as misguided bullying.
“We like mavericks here,” said Thomas D. Rath, a longtime political strategist in New Hampshire. “But there is a line.”
Mr. Christie has seemed on the verge of crossing that line in the past, like when he shouted down a voter at a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
The concept of a governor whose top aides mete out political revenge by triggering a giant traffic jam “could be a problem” for people in the state, said Mr. Rath, who has advised the Republican presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mr. Romney.
Timeline of Events
“Passion has to be tempered by courtesy,” he said. “It shouldn’t be about getting back at people.”
The recent contretemps is especially jarring because it revolves around nakedly partisan score-settling against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, the kind of behavior that Mr. Christie has forsworn at every turn.
Bipartisanship has become a byword of his administration, turning his news conferences into celebrations of his ability to reach across the aisle.
“Our bipartisan accomplishments in New Jersey have helped set the tone that has taken hold across many other states,” Mr. Christie has said, and he routinely scolds lawmakers in Washington for failing to follow his lead.
Even if he played no direct role in the lane closures, his administration has lost some of its post-partisan luster. “It’s always hard for anti-politicians when voters find out they have to be politicians, too,” said Alex Castellanos, an adviser to Mr. Romney in his 2008 campaign.
And while thus far the story has only entangled the governor’s aides, and not the governor — the newly released emails included messages from Mr. Christie’s campaign manager and statehouse press secretary — any indication that his denials of involvement were less than truthful could do deep damage to his straight-shooting reputation.
Still, Mr. Castellanos said he doubted the controversy would inflict lasting harm to Mr. Christie’s reputation outside of New Jersey.
National Democrats did everything they could on Wednesday to ensure that it would. The Democratic National Committee blasted out a scorching Web video about the lane closures. It showed Mr. Christie indignantly denying that his staff had a hand in the decision, and the committee’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, played up the danger the road changes posed to families in the state.
The danger for Mr. Christie, according to Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, is that Republican Party donors on the fence about the governor will find new reasons to doubt his viability as the party’s standard-bearer.
“It plays into a narrative,” he said. “That party leaders and donors don’t know everything about Christie that they need to know.”
In New Jersey, there were already signs of a remade political landscape. A few days ago, the incoming speaker of the State Assembly, Vincent Prieto, stood side by side with Mr. Christie at an elementary school auditorium, praising him for collaborating with Democrats and Republicans on a piece of legislation.
On Wednesday, Mr. Prieto, a Democrat, issued a different kind of message: He vowed that the Legislature’s investigation into the lane closings would extend well into the new year.