It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once. In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones that Mr. Christie “threw his weight around” to avoid getting traffic tickets.
In the ugly New Jersey contest for governor, Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie have traded all sorts of shots, over mothers and mammograms, loans and lying. But now, Mr. Corzine’s campaign is calling attention to his rival’s corpulence in increasingly overt ways.
On the one hand, this seems like it couldn’t possibly work. Who’s going to be anything but repulsed from Corzine by these tactics? On the other, it does often seem that prejudice against the overweight is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice. But this really looks to me like a (deserved) backlash waiting to happen.
Update
Well, now that I’ve watched the ad in question I’m really not sure it does what the NYT is claiming it does. This looks to me like a straightforward attack ad about Christie’s ability to evade punishment for some traffic violations.
