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Helicopter joyriding Gov: Hypocrite, or doting dad?

New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie has garnered much of his fame in the last year by blaming teachers for all the economic ills of his state. Endless YouTube videos show the governor taking on teachers and accusing them of bringing in lavish paychecks on the backs of taxpayers.

Well, his fiscally conservative rants seem a bit hollow today. Turns out, he took a state helicopter to his kid’s baseball game on Tuesday and lots of folks are up in arms.

“Gov. Christie obviously doesn’t include himself in his hollow call for shared sacrifice,” Democratic state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty told the Associated Press.

Yes, this is all part of the political gotcha game that we’ve all come to know and love, but it also points to an odd conundrum for me, a labor columnist and blogger.

I’m not big on politicians attacking hard-working people, especially teachers, so his apparent hypocrisy shows how empty his attacks have been.

But I’m also going to go out on a limb here and defend the guy, who is not just a governor but a father. When you get to a certain level in your career balancing work and family can be hell.

One of the reasons we often hear as to why there aren’t more women at the top is they just can’t balance raising kids and big, demanding jobs. So, if we are to level the playing field, maybe we need to allow such perks for our leaders so they can still keep up with family responsibilities. I’m not saying a helicopter would have been my choice as the kind of perk I’m thinking about, but the governor wasn’t going to a strip joint. It was his son’s high school baseball game.

I was one of the only bloggers who defended Sarah Palin when she took her kids on trips on Alaskan taxpayers’ dimes.

Here’s an excerpt from my Huffington Post piece:

… the Alaska governor charged the state “for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel.”

First off, where the heck else would a governor stay, a fleabag motel? And, if the “First Dude” was snowmobile racing, who the heck was going to watch the girls back home?

Welcome to today’s family reality. If we want men and women with families to have thriving careers, this kind of expense has to be tolerated.

States and corporations spend plenty of money on stupid things. How about giving huge payouts to the heirs of dead CEOs for one? Why not spend some travel cash for the family of a CEO who is still alive?

“We can’t continue to ignore the fact that there are women in the workplace and we have children,” says Laura Lowell, editor of “42 Rules for Working Moms.”

And men have kids too. I get why people are upset at Gov. Christie, but shouldn’t we be talking about more than his budgetary hypocrisy? Whether we like it or not, there’s also a work-life issue here to be debated.

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