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Mike Francesa and Chris Christie Flirt, Discuss Christie's Inevitable Transition to Sports Radio

What's the next act for New Jersey's disgraced and historically unpopular governor? Hanging up on radio callers proposing lopsided Yankees trades, hopefully.
When another radio host has a balloon. Photo by Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

People tend to talk about living in a post-politics country with a certain amount of dread, which makes sense when you consider the types of people that talk about things like "living in a post-politics country." The prospect of living in a country that has effectively opted out of self-governance—or actively opted into an idea of politics as a sort of dark and grueling and endless television show without any good-looking people in it—is an unpleasant and unappealing one on its face. But talking about it in that arch theater-critic tone may somehow be even worse. Anyway, it doesn't help.

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Doing politics, the actual work of trying to seize and operate the various prehistoric, rusted-shut apparatuses that comprise the political system, is something else entirely, and something much more significant. But in a period of full-spectrum decline and a broader, slouching cultural obesity, the rhetorical performance of elevated political lamentation feels, well, not at all like a solution, for one, and even almost something like the problem. Anyway, it feels helpless and vague, like the background noise of an unloved and unlovable show that runs nonstop, across channels, on a television that does not turn off. That sort of critique is exhausting and enervating, and mostly it is that way because it feels symptomatic and so complicit; it is exactly the sort of thing you might hear if you were living in a post-politics country, or at least in a place and time that has chosen campaign-y aesthetics over anything else that resembles politics. In a place and time like that, nothing could be easier to tune out.

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Of course such an age would give us embarrassing, cynical, stupid, multiply shitty politicians; they are the ones who would flourish most in such an environment, and the ones with the most to gain from it. If politics collapses into empty signaling and confrontation at both the high end and the low—if the only political discourse we have is pitched as a series of wrestling matches favoring some flavor of partisan signaling—then the people best at sending those signals and most eager for that sort of glib confrontation would be the ones to benefit most.

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If you listen to sports talk radio or have absorbed any of the Embrace Debate family of programs on ESPN or Fox Sports 1, you know what that looks and sounds like where sports is concerned. There's a great deal of false umbrage and stagey taking of offense, but mostly there's a sort of surreal density to it all, both in the dense-meaning-stupid sense and in the way that every single silly thing is discussed in the same key and at the same volume as everything else. Because every trivial thing is treated as if it is as important as every other trivial thing, and discussed in the same superheated way that one might discuss something very important, there is no letup or distinction. All of it comes out fake and weird, naturally, but also fake and weird in the same ways, and just as fake and just as weird as everything else. It's a long howling expanse of meaningless shit, but the game is to fight for every inch of it.

You have probably noticed that, in the last election and for many others before, our politics now feels like this, too. It's exhausting, and mostly because of how confusing it is; the specific distribution of energy and attention is obvious, but the reasoning behind that is opaque and unreadable. Everyone is shouting, everyone is always shouting, but why? And why are they shouting about what they're shouting about? How can every meaningless thing be not just very important but exactly as important as every other meaningless thing?

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When you see Jerry Jones, who is such a great guy. Photo by Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY NETWORK

People who remember Chris Christie only as Donald Trump's omnipresent Grimace-shaped humiliation totem during the last Presidential campaign may be surprised to know that, while still ostensibly the governor of New Jersey, he has regularly picked up morning shifts as a substitute host on WFAN's "Boomer and Carton" morning show. When he does so, Christie plugs in for either Craig Carton or Boomer Esiason, and more or less does what he does. He's windy or peremptory, he's both casually informed and passionately certain, and he generally slides easily into character as just the sort of self-superior wad who would otherwise get paid to bellow and declaim and exult about sports on the radio all day. It might be a bit much to say that Christie is good at it; he's fundamentally too pompous to be very interesting, and he doesn't really know that much about the things he so righteously holds forth about. But it's no exaggeration to say that he's a natural.

This is a tough wave to ride for very long, but Christie surfed it with surprising grace for some time. As a politician, he picked his fights with a born bully's pure instincts, and made a brand out of waving his stumpy pink fingers in the faces of middle-aged schoolteachers; as a presidential candidate, his sole strength was knowing to avoid the bigger, dumber bully in the yard. Christie's knack for this type of stage-managed, lopsided confrontation placed him firmly in a local political tradition alongside less-entertaining retribution-minded reptiles like Rudy Giuliani and Alfonse D'Amato. Giuliani, a horny and predatory vampire bat, is famous enough that you probably know what he's about; D'Amato, a tryhard reactionary cheese-log who wasn't quite vicious enough to break it big, was last seen trying to foment a people's revolution on a JetBlue flight. These are not serious people, or not serious about anything but their own grievances, but they at least knew how to sell. The people that they governed suffered greatly from the political reality that those personal failings created—Christie's historic unpopularity in New Jersey owes as much to his disastrous and petty misgovernance as it does to his own personal disastrousness and pettiness—but the truest tragedy of it is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Chris Christie was talented enough at a certain type of toxic performance art, but he never should have been in politics in the first place. He has always belonged on sports talk radio.

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In a conversation with WFAN's Mike Francesa last Friday, Christie hit his marks as professionally as any professional could have. Francesa adopted the flirtatiously jabbing tone that he takes with the rare guests whom he considers to be his equal. The soul-deep exasperation that Francesa brings to his usual engagements with foaming or despondent Jets fans was nowhere in evidence, and he instead spent a great deal of energy attempting to broadcast that his conversation with this powerful man was very much just Two Buddies Chopping It Up, As Buddies. He jabbed at Christie for being a Cowboys fan—one born, as Francesa lightly noted, of the purest fair-weather instinct—but in a way that was mostly designed to let both parties expound on what an excellent and good man Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is, and how similarly excellent his children are, and how both parties in the conversation know this from experience. It's not any more fun than it sounds, but fun is not really part of the equation with Francesa at this point. You listen to him, if you listen to him, to hear him be Mike Francesa.

Francesa is one of the weirdest institutions in all of sports media, and his appeal is almost impossible to explain to the uninitiated; also "appeal" is absolutely not the word at all, but that is part of the bigger problem he presents. Francesa is far from the only grandiose egomaniac in sports talk radio, but there is a filigreed intricacy to his grandiosity that is unlike any other; the man is so strenuously over it and above it all in his self-presentation and performance that he can barely even be bothered to talk about sports on his five-hour sports-talk show. He cares about the NFL, and loves horse racing; it is easy to imagine that, in some air-conditioned study in his vast and lustily carpeted home, there is a painting of Francesa and one of his racehorses that is a perfect replica of Tony Soprano's painting of himself with Pie-Oh-My. Francesa's lack of interest and sighing impatience with his (many, many) lessers is the whole show, and if it's the sort of thing you like, then you probably like it. If you want to hear about sports, you'd go elsewhere. If you want to witness the zenith of a particular kind of sports-aligned masculine vanity, you should absolutely keep it locked.

Francesa says he's retiring at the end of 2017 and repeatedly hinted, in his conversation with Christie, that the governor would make a worthy heir to his throne. Given that a job being a dick about sports on the radio is about the only gig Christie is likely to get in the tri-state area anytime soon, the governor did well to be diplomatic in how he handled this come-on. "Mike, you don't throw your hat in the ring for that kind of thing," Christie said. "You just see what happens. I enjoy doing this kind of stuff, but I enjoy talking about news also and current events. But I love sports. I've always been a huge sports fan." Francesa, who sees himself as a renaissance man with an instinct for politics, talked politics with the governor for the last third of the segment; it was, in tone and depth and seriousness, indistinguishable from the part of the interview in which both discussed what a remarkable man they personally knew Roger Staubach to be.

What would a post-politics country look like? You already know the answer to that, but here is an example of how it might work or not work in the moment. The membrane between the things that matter and the things that don't would become porous, and then more porous, and then effectively invisible; every football game would be discussed as if it was a war, or an election, and also every war or election would be discussed with the shallow pomp that we bring to football games. Everything would matter, and not matter; everything would be talked about just like everything else, which is to say both as a matter of life and death and with a sort of winking abstraction. This would scan as strange, at first—why is this person so angry about lunch, you might wonder, and why is this person also so spookily blasé about the deaths of tens of thousands of other people, somewhere else? But when you go to articulate this point, you would find another problem: there is no way to communicate the urgency of that weirdness. Or, anyway, you'd find that there's no way that makes it stand out as sufficiently urgent or otherwise different from the similar sounds that everyone else is making. It's not just dense and vacuous. It's that every conversation is precisely as dense and vacuous as every other. Some sound escapes this vacuum, but it is all the same sound.

This is when the cacophony we make sounds its strangest, and when it is the hardest to listen to—when it becomes impossible to distinguish between the Cowboys or the caliphate, or between win-or-go-home or life-and-death. There is a harmony in that, just in the way the notes all line up, but it is a deeply dissociative and discordant one. Far be it from me to tell Chris Christie what he should do with the rest of his life; his whole life is a catalog of the things he would punish to further exalt himself, and we should not assume that he's done with that work. But if the chaos ahead sounds like sports radio—hauteur and ignorance, disdain on disdain, curdled passion in all the pettiest places—then Chris Christie has earned his place in it. It's hard to know who would want to listen, but Christie has earned his place as a voice in that choir.