What Our Largest President Can Teach Governor Christie About Fat Jokes

Governor Christie, seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is facing jokes about his weight. As these proliferate, there are lessons to be learned from our largest chief executive, President Taft, who blunted their sting by turning them into positives.When a voter at Monday’s CNN town hall asked Mr. Christie how being the first president of Italian ancestry would influence him, he gave an answer Taft would’ve loved. “The food will be better in the White House,” he said. “Guaranteed.”The weight question is out there, with President Trump sharing a video of Mr. Christie’s campaign announcement edited to show him holding a plate of food. The former New Jersey governor called Mr. Trump “a spoiled baby” saying if a child “conducted themselves like that, we’d send them to their room, not to the White House.”Mr. Christie said that while he has “struggled” with his weight, he hadn’t ever struggled with his character. “I’ll put that up against Donald Trump’s any day.” Taft avoided playing the victim, too, making jests at his own expense, crafting an image of power like the one described by an editor at the Sun, Arthur Brisbane, who wrote that compared to other men, Taft was “a great battleship” among “smaller vessels.”In 2013 on “The Late Show,” Mr. Christie sailed this same course. “If the joke is funny,” he said, “I laugh, even if it’s about me.” He even ate a donut on set, which might not seem presidential, but coincided with the high point of his national popularity.In June 1908, the Sun wrote that Texan Taft supporters saluted his size, tacking a giant pair of trousers to a flagpole, under which they affixed the slogan, “As pants the heart for the cooling stream, so Texas pants for Taft.”Even in an era when Fat Men’s Clubs were popular, Americans “made infinite jests about his fatness,” Brisbane said, “and no one heard or repeated the jokes with greater savor than Taft himself.”In 1909, the Sun reported that “nearly every public speaker” took “a whack at” Taft’s “heft” at an event. “He seems to enjoy it quite as much as the crowd and seems to realize that it is a legitimate topic for fun-making. Anyone seems at liberty to refer to his girth in his presence.”President Taft, around 1910. MPI/Getty ImagesTV has raised the importance of appearance, and social media encourages cruelty, but Taft survived the barbs, such as the persistent myth that he got stuck in a bathtub.Brisbane recounted how Taft repeated the jokes with “a rumbling chuckle as infectious as only a fat man could achieve,” savoring digs. “Taft,” an associate justice of the Supreme Court, David Brewer, said, “is the politest man in Washington — the other day, he gave up his seat in a streetcar to three ladies.”Taft used this setup often. When Yale offered him a chair of law, he responded that a chair would be inadequate, but a sofa “might be all right,” and joked when crammed into a seat at a play, “If this theater burns, it has got to burn around me.”A Republican senator from New York, Chauncey Depew, laid a hand on Taft’s belly and asked what he’d name the baby, and when Taft cabled the secretary of war, Elihu Root, that he’d just finished a 25-mile horseback ride in the Philippines, Root wrote back, “How is horse?”President Theodore Roosevelt remarked that Taft ought to give up riding “because it was cruelty to the horse,” and during a debate over White House automobiles, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, James Tawney, said Taft “proposes to abandon horses” rather than “violate the law against cruelty to animals.” An aide to Taft, Archibald Butt, noticed that after his first year in office, “the fat man jokes about him,” which had been “genial and kindly, began to take on a caustic tang,” with some “saucy little brats” yelling, “Hello, Fatty!”If — or when — those cruel jokes come, Mr. Christie, who boasts of being a brawling “Jersey Guy,” will fire back, but for the good-natured jibes, his best strategy is to laugh along — a battleship among dinghies, seeking to sail his way into Taft’s massive Oval Office chair.

What Our Largest President Can Teach Governor Christie About Fat Jokes

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