It was an old trick, but it worked - at least for a while.
I learned of Chris Christie's latest stunt when I received an email from a reader Wednesday morning.
I'd spent the day before covering the ceremony in which Democrat Phil Murphy was sworn in as governor, replacing Republican Christie.
But as my reader watched TV Tuesday evening, he saw the now ex-governor featured in a televised ad highlighting the state's addiction services.
"I can't believe they don't temporarily suspend the commercials until the spokesperson can be changed," he wrote. "What gives?"
What gave was that Christie pulled a fast one on Murphy. The outgoing governor set aside funding so those commercials could keep running after he was back in private life.
The stunt seems to have blindsided the new governor's staff. By Friday afternoon, Murphy's communication people still hadn't responded to emails in which I asked them when the Democratic administration would stop giving free air time to the state's most prominent - and ambitious - Republican.
Perhaps the new people are a bit too trusting. There are indeed some innocent souls out there who believe that elected officials appear in such public-service announcements out of the goodness of their hearts.
But anyone who understands politics knows that these are simply campaign ads - paid for out of the public purse.
The master of this art was the Republican governor Christie campaigned for as a teenager back when both lived in Livingston.
In 1983, Gov. Tom Kean Sr. managed to get his mug plastered on TV screens all over the tristate area in tourism ads in which he memorably proclaimed "New Jersey and you: Perfect together!"
The pretext - a brilliant one - was that these ads had to be carried on the big networks in New York and Philadelphia to attract out-of-state tourists to New Jersey. But of course the ads were seen by Jersey voters as well.
It was no coincidence that the grinning governor seen making that pitch went on to a landslide re-election victory in 1985.
By the way, the earliest of those ads had Kean co-starring with none other than Bill Cosby. Now there's a guy who could do an anti-drug commercial: "Ladies, never put down your drink when you're with a guy!"
But at least those ads were funded through the normal budget process. That's not the case with the Christie ads.
News reports said Christie freed up about $40 million for the ads by moving money around in the budget from other programs. Another $100 million was moved around to fund expanded treatment programs for drug addicts.
We're only halfway through the 2018 fiscal year, so it's up to Murphy to decide whether he wants to spend that money the way Christie intended. That's another question I couldn't get answered by his people.
But I know how I feel about that expenditure. I'm against it. I don't buy the central premise of Christie's personal war on drugs. That's the idea that addiction is a disease.
I've come to reject that approach after my many conversations with Stanton Peele, a psychologist who until recently lived in Christie's own Morris County.
Peele is perhaps the most prominent critic of what you might call the addiction-industrial complex. That complex consumes ever-increasing amounts of state and federal funding, about a billion dollars a year in New Jersey.
But as spending increases, so do overdose deaths, Peele said. So what are we getting for our money?
"One way to put it is to ask is addiction treatment effective?" he said. "Well in terms of cutting overdose deaths, no. But in terms of generating never-ending sources of funding, yes."
Perhaps the best example of that came from Christie himself. In his speeches about drugs, he often cites the example of a family friend who became addicted to pain-killers and eventually overdosed - despite being in and out of rehab.
In other words, he provides proof that rehab often fails to work. And then he insists we need more rehab.
The problem, said Peele, is that the providers insist on convincing patients that they are dependent on drugs. Instead they should be emphasizing self-reliance, he said.
"Getting high is something you do on your own and quitting is something you do on your own as well," said Peele.
And then there's the question of marijuana legalization. Studies show that in states where people have easy access to marijuana they consume less opioids. Yet Christie is an avid anti-pot crusader.
If Christie truly thinks it's his calling in life to extend the nanny state, then that's certainly his right as a private citizen.
But he should find someone else to pay for it.
My tax dollars are needed elsewhere.
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