I'm not sure if in this article Michael Kinsley is really saying that Chris Christie is too fat to be president…or if Kinsley thinks that enough people will think that to doom any candidacy. Either way, I don't think it'll matter much. Yeah, we don't elect fat people to high office in this country…except that we do. Christie is governor of New Jersey, remember? And there are plenty of senators and congressfolks and other governors. Why should it matter for the highest office if it doesn't matter for those jobs?
And I keep hearing folks on my teevee say this nation hasn't elected an overweight president since Taft. Well, how many have run? It wasn't that long ago, you could have argued against Obama by pointing out we'd never elected a black guy. And what if you substituted "female" for "fat" in the sentence, "This country doesn't put [fat] people in the Oval Office"? We haven't elected a woman president but no one would suggest that we'll never do that.
If Christie runs, will his weight be an issue? Sure. These days, everything about the guy you want to see lose is an issue. There are folks who condemn Obama because he smokes, relies more on a TelePrompter than some other presidents, has a wife who likes ribs. I remember some guy on the old CNN Crossfire program who tried to argue that Al Gore was unfit for the presidency because "you can tell a lot about a man by the kinds of ties he picks out."
Gore's ties didn't cost him any votes. They were just an insult that one detractor hurled at him because he didn't know what else to say against him. It might even help Christie as a presidential candidate if all his opponents could find to criticize about him was his weight. No one will vote against him because of that.
Why they might is that he isn't the ideolgically pure, Tea Party perfect candidate that the movers 'n' shakers of the Republican party seem to want. He isn't a spotless enemy of immigration or gun control, for example. I'm going to guess that as we get closer to the day when they have to pick someone, a lot of Republicans are going to decide that they want to oust Obama more than they want to install a guy who'll dismantle government, deport all Hispanics and do away with the Capital Gains tax. But I don't think they're prepared to compromise on their perfect candidate…yet. Right now, I think the attitude will be that if they want to settle for a flawed candidate, they have plenty of them who have momentum, existing campaign organizations and in some cases, financial war chests. And none of them are fat.