Keller @ Large: Lessons From Christie Campaign
BOSTON (CBS) -- People have a natural tendency to look to success stories for inspiration and leadership lessons.
But sometimes you can also learn a lot from failure.
So before it fades into hard-earned obscurity, let's see what lessons we can extract from the debacle of Chris Christie's run for president, which ended yesterday after a poor showing in New Hampshire.
It wasn't so long ago that some Republicans were begging Christie to run. A former US attorney, he upset the incumbent governor of New Jersey in 2010 and became a national star for restoring fiscal balance to a badly-mismanaged state.
But success quickly went to Christie's head.
I got a close-up look at him during the 2012 GOP convention in Tampa, where his ballooning ego was on full display. Given the high-profile keynote speech at the convention, it was all he could do to shoehorn a few remarks about the party nominee, Mitt Romney, into a lengthy discourse on his own wonderfulness.
When Hurricane Sandy decimated the Jersey shore that fall, Christie reveled in his photo op with the president, with poor follow-through on behalf of state residents who'd been damaged.
And when his closest aides got caught playing politics with traffic flow over the George Washington Bridge, his image as an arrogant political hack was cemented, and his New Hampshire campaign did nothing to change that.
Morals of the story?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Be careful not to overreach.
And if you lose your humility, you lose all perspective, and risk winding up, as Christie has, an also-ran.
Listen to Jon's commentary: