Magazine's Christie cover raises outcry
TRENTON - Gov. Christie's postelection domination of national media continued Thursday with a new Time magazine cover featuring a silhouette of the newly anointed front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination and the headline: "The Elephant in the Room."
![Gov. Christie talks with a tour of Girl Scouts as he returns to work at the Statehouse in Trenton after his landslide victory. Meanwhile, a Time magazine cover raised eyebrows. Story, A2.](https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/v2/W6URFYSZSBCSVG75VHJV2RDDPA.jpg?auth=764db65958f85d903561935ffde1d053cc1b110b5fef4d3b9ca04697336e71d1&width=760&height=507&smart=true)
TRENTON - Gov. Christie's postelection domination of national media continued Thursday with a new Time magazine cover featuring a silhouette of the newly anointed front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination and the headline: "The Elephant in the Room."
The Internet's reaction was not kind, to say the least - to Time.
First of all, some noted that with Christie's landslide win this week, he is not the proverbial elephant in the room - everyone is well aware of his presence. CNN devoted much of its week to what felt like wall-to-wall coverage of the New Jersey governor's political future.
And second, wasn't this just a cheap fat joke with a nod to the fact that the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party?
As Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote in Salon: "Nobody needs to tiptoe around the reality of what Chris Christie looks like. Chris Christie knows what he looks like. . . . But even when he's not clocking in at Paul Ryan weight, you don't need to call him a pachyderm. And anybody who does is just a big fat jerk."
Time was prompted to run a follow-up article to cover the reaction. The story explained that the three Christie pieces in the magazine, which hits newsstands Friday, are about "Christie's outsized influence in his party and the discomfort he causes some fellow Republicans who consider him, well, the elephant in the room."
Christie's spokesman had no comment.