Talking about the decline of NJ Transit and the specific gubernatorial policies that led to it is relevant in a debate about congestion pricing. This would have been the case even if he was not a presidential candidate.

I think it’s availability heuristic. There are lots of people I don’t criticize because they’re irrelevant. As soon as they make themselves relevant…they are opened up to both more enthusiasm and critique.

You are being paranoid.

If nobody was talking about Christie, it's because 95% of what he did only impacted NJ. This is a spillover, because it happens to be related to a megacity doing something for the first time in North America.

But, beyond that, when people start running for president, people start talking about them. Criticisms or not. No one talked about Joe Biden doing anything from the start of the 2016 election until he announced in 2020, in spite of having been a major political player for decades.

Christie's buffoonery around transit[1] is a somewhat staid topic in NYC politics, and this is an article about NYC.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal

> Nobody was talking about Christie at all for years

I've been hearing about Christie for absolute ages, no clue at all what you're on about.

Until primaries are over, primary candidates of national parties mostly attack their opponents… (hint: their opponents are other candidates in their primary)

It is entirely explicable why anyone is talking about Christie this week and not last week.

That just sounds like recency bias. Plus before announcing they're more likely to have not been in the news.

A more charitable interpretation is people have suddenly been reminded that he exists and of what he did. I don’t think that anyone is getting paid to do propaganda against Republican primary candidates on Hacker News. That goes doubly so for candidates that have a functionally zero percent chance of winning (Christie knows that - he’s just there to attack Trump).