For Christie, Ailing Economy at Home May Test His Allure

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: February 21, 2011

In a year as governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie has captivated conservatives across the nation, with an in-your-face frankness and nonstop aggressiveness that few have seen from a chief executive.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Gov. Chris Christie, in Washington last week, will propose his budget on Tuesday.

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Last week, his swaggering talk — about tackling the really big problems, taming unions and cutting a ballooning deficit without raising taxes — earned him a hero’s welcome in Washington, where journalists pressed him on his presidential aspirations.

But while it is clear that Mr. Christie, 48, a Republican, has already upended the status quo, putting powerful interest groups on the defensive, and all but having his way with a Democratic-controlled Legislature, the challenges of the coming year could cinch his reputation as a political superstar — or puncture it.

Without question, Mr. Christie, who is proposing his budget on Tuesday, has torn into the financial problems he faced with gusto. He has cut spending, limited taxes, forced government workers to give more and get less, and insisted on legislative reforms that could put the state on a firmer footing.

His biggest tests, indeed, are not likely to come from New Jersey’s public-sector unions, which appear almost cowed compared with their counterparts in Wisconsin, where labor protests have brought government skidding to a halt. Mr. Christie, after all, has invested energy in turning public opinion against those public-sector workers.

Yet his agenda of balancing the budget, rescuing a pension fund that could go broke within a decade and curtailing rising property taxes — the holy grail of politics in his heavily suburban state — is far from achieved. And he still could face the wrath of voters who discover that the costs of government have merely been shifted onto their local tax bills.

“People have heard the tough talk, but they haven’t felt the full effect of what he’s done,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “That may happen in the next year. And voters tell us that if their property taxes don’t go down, they will hold him responsible.”

In his first year, Governor Christie closed a yawning budget deficit that he estimated at almost $11 billion, though in part by skipping a $3 billion payment to the pension system. At $29.4 billion, spending is down more than $5 billion from its peak two years earlier.

In proposing his budget on Tuesday, the governor is expected to call for more cuts to close another huge deficit. With major union contracts set to expire in June, he is calling for a wage freeze, which polls show the public supports.

But the state will still be deeply in debt, and facing a growing shortfall in its pension fund — $54 billion and counting — that helped spur a downgrade of the state’s bonds.

Much of the effort to reduce benefits, shore up retiree funds and require workers to contribute more for their benefits began under Gov. Jon S. Corzine, the Democrat whom Mr. Christie ousted in 2009.

But comparisons with his predecessors make Mr. Christie look only more formidable.

From the moment he took over, Mr. Christie has flexed more of the muscle of New Jersey’s strong governorship, and with greater evident glee, than any recent occupant.

The state has a thick layer of unelected authorities, for example, with responsibilities like operating sports arenas and overseeing sewage. Governors can void their actions merely by vetoing the minutes of their meetings, something Mr. Christie did more often in his first four weeks than Mr. Corzine did in four years.

“It gained him a high degree of public trust,” said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. “People figured, he’s watching our tax dollars.”

Mr. Christie’s office also took over contract talks with highway toll collectors, threatening to privatize their jobs, and he capped school superintendents’ salaries, forcing two out of three to take pay cuts.

When the teachers’ union resisted his demands for a wage freeze, he persuaded voters to defeat hundreds of school budgets. And he got nearly everything he wanted in the budget negotiations last year, making the deepest cuts in generations.

Those cuts included aid to schools, and many districts responded with higher property taxes. But the governor and the Legislature imposed a cap on property tax increases, which will pressure local officials to squeeze unions further, and they capped the salary increases public employees can win in arbitration.

Though Democrats control both houses, the Legislature has repeatedly given the governor some version of what he wanted, dismaying allies in organized labor. “He has created a political climate where he’s perceived as being such a winner that nobody wants to defy him,” Ms. Harrison said.

In a fortunate bit of timing for Mr. Christie, Stephen M. Sweeney, Democrat of Gloucester County, took over as president of the Senate; his predecessor was both more liberal and more antagonistic toward the governor.

Senator Sweeney is a union official himself, but from the construction industry, and he had long advocated rolling back the gains made by government workers, who had not given up as much as their private-sector brethren.

Last year, the governor and the Legislature quickly agreed on changes for new public employees: cutting pension benefits, requiring employee contributions to health coverage, excluding part-time workers from the pension system and capping lump-sum payouts of accrued sick leave when workers retire.

Now, Mr. Christie and Mr. Sweeney are each calling for similar cutbacks for current workers. In the past, such changes were enacted after being negotiated with the unions. Under Mr. Christie, the approach is the reverse: use the laws to constrain coming contract talks.

“What it really amounts to is doing away with collective bargaining,” said Hetty Rosenstein, state director of the Communications Workers, the largest state employee union. “It’s a pretty radical shift to gut public-sector labor unions.”

Mr. Christie’s record has not been unblemished. He botched an application for $400 million in federal education money at a time when he was cutting twice that amount.

And in December, Mr. Christie was at Disney World during a blizzard that paralyzed the state. He refused to apologize, saying he had kept in touch with the acting governor, Mr. Sweeney — but Mr. Sweeney said they never spoke.

Yet such gaffes have not transcended the state’s borders, while Mr. Christie’s YouTube rants against teachers and their union leaders have become widespread. Mr. Christie is less popular in New Jersey than with national Republicans: polls show that only about 50 percent of residents approve of his performance.

Where his poll numbers head now may depend on whether Mr. Christie can begin to show success in solving seemingly intractable problems like high property taxes before voters start to hold him responsible.

“When you cut billions of dollars from local government, you can’t turn around and say ‘It’s the mayor’s fault’ — you’re the one who did it,” Mr. Sweeney said. “In Chris Christie’s New Jersey, class sizes are going up, and crime is going through the roof in our inner cities. Eventually, people are going to realize, ‘I’m paying a lot more now, and I have a lot less.’ The people have not realized it yet. But he’s the governor, and the music’s going to stop.”