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Aides and appointees of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have been accused of closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge to punish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, pictured, for not endorsing Christie for re-election. If true, this wouldn't be the first time an American politician was targeted with dirty tricks -- the practice goes back as far as running for office. Click through to see other examples of less-than-ethical campaign tactics.

Prostitution allegations: Sen. Robert Menendez of New York denied that he paid a woman for sex, saying allegations that he did were part of a smear campaign. "Any allegations of engaging with prostitutes are manufactured by a politically motivated right-wing blog and are false," Menendez's office said in a statement. The alleged prostitute later filed a notarized statement saying she had never even met Menendez.

Fake letters: Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, running for president, was expected to do well in the 1972 Democratic primary in neighboring New Hampshire. But the Manchester Union-Leader published a letter alleging that Muskie condoned the use of the term "Canuck," a derogatory term used against French-Canadians. Muskie denied the charge but still suffered at the polls in the early primary, which doomed his chances. The Washington Post later reported that the letter was a hoax and was probably written by Ken Clawson, deputy White House communications director in the Nixon administration.

Watergate: The break-in at the Watergate office complex was just the tip of the iceberg in regards to what was going on within President Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972. The Nixon machine was hell-bent on destroying its opponents, and Donald Segretti, pictured, was one of the primary dirty tricksters. The Nixon operative printed fliers that attacked Muskie on his stance against Israel, and he placed them outside synagogues. He also pitted Democrats against one another in a tactic he called "rat-f---ing," like the letter addressed from Citizens for Muskie that accused Democratic primary rival Sen. Henry Jackson of being a homosexual and fathering an illegitimate child with a teenager. Segretti was one of several Nixon operatives who ended up in jail.

Doctored photos?: Ross Perot was the first major third-person candidate in modern American politics to mount a serious run for the White House. His plainspokenness got attention, and his platform appealed to the far right. Most of all, he was seen as a threat to split the Republican vote with President George H.W. Bush, who was running for his second term. Despite the energy in his campaign, Perot dropped out of the race, claiming that Republican operatives were about to smear his daughter with doctored photos and try to ruin her wedding. Perot never explained what the photograph purportedly showed.

The mystery of Alvin Greene: When Alvin Greene suddenly won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in South Carolina, experts asked, "Who?" Greene didn't campaign, had no political experience and was rarely seen in public. A CNN interview led to more questions of whether Greene, pictured, was intellectually capable of running a viable campaign. Others felt that Greene was planted by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who was running for re-election. Greene was cleared by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division before he lost overwhelmingly to DeMint.

Swift-boating: Before John Kerry, far right, was elected senator, he won the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam and later protested against the war. When he ran for president in 2004, he spoke out against the Iraq War. Although Kerry was seen as the underdog in the race, he was gaining momentum before a political ad released by the group known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused Kerry of speaking ill of his fellow veterans and lying to get his medals. Kerry first tried to ignore the ads before denying the allegations, but by then the ads -- and Kerry's avoiding them -- stopped whatever momentum was building.

(CNN) -- It's a cliche of American presidential politics -- the president we elect is always a reaction to what came before. As in: Nixonian shenanigans eventually gave rise to Jimmy Carter's self-righteousness. Clintonesque parsing gave way to George W. Bush's plain speaking. Bush's plain speaking begat Barack Obama's lofty speechifying.

Oversimplified? Yes. But true nonetheless.

And so we head into 2016 (yes, already) and Chris Christie's ready-made narrative: If Obama is lofty, Christie is down to earth. If Obama wasn't tough enough, he's hard-hitting. If Obama couldn't run his complex health care rollout, he's a strong manager. If Obama was partisan, he's worked across party lines.

In sum: Christie can lead in the precise ways that Obama disappointed.

Until a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge. Then came another stark contrast: the vindictive -- and more important, petty -- Christie culture as opposed to the stature the presidency demands.

So far, the New Jersey melodrama looks like the worst side of the Christie ethos. The apparent reprisals against Democratic mayors. The vanity of featuring the Christie family in taxpayer-funded commercials. The environment in which retribution reigned when Christie did not get what he wanted. The arrogance of believing he was deserving of it all, and to hell with the rest of 'em.

Chris Christie under federal investigation

Springsteen & Fallon mock bridge scandal

Christie's State of the State address

The grand storyline behind all of this, of course, is the design on the presidency: Christie wanted to be re-elected by such an overwhelming margin that it would launch his national aspirations into the stratosphere. The plan was to get bipartisan support to show his viability as a national candidate. All who stood in the way were official enemies.

This is not to say that presidents don't have enemies. Of course they do. You don't get elected to any office in this country, much less president of the United States, without accumulating political enemies. But the real question is WHY you consider someone an enemy, and then, how you deal with it.

As president, LBJ had always had a bunch, but the enmity -- and payback -- generally came over issues, not self-aggrandizement. It's Politics 101: If you want to pass a civil rights bill and you don't get a "yes" vote from an opponent who wants a bridge in his state, no bridge.

That's very different from saying if you don't endorse my candidacy I will shut down your bridge. That's not politics; it's puny payback. And, worse, the impact is felt not only by the opponent, but by his -- and your -- constituents. A bridge way too far.

Then consider Bill Clinton, who had plenty of enemies. A former senior Clinton adviser reminds me that "it became a joke that the best thing to be was Clinton's enemy. If 99 people in a room were for him, and one was against him, he would spend all his time trying to persuade that one guy he was wrong. And he was always willing to argue the substance. Always. In fact, he enjoyed it."

This is not to turn Clinton and LBJ into saintly role models and Christie into the devil. But it is to say that Christie's staff shenanigans -- which he says he did not know about -- have raised enormous questions about his temperament and how he would run a White House. In fact, a Monmouth University poll released this week shows that only 44% of New Jersey voters believe that their governor has the right temperament for the Oval Office.

The characterization of Christie and Obama as opposite numbers is accurate in many ways. There's this: When then-Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent, endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain for the presidency in 2008 -- and became his outspoken travel buddy -- there were calls for retribution after Obama won.

So what did Obama do? He kept Lieberman on as chairman of an important committee. It kept an enemy close, not a bad strategy.

Obama is cool and Christie is all drama. And now a line of argument against him as petty and vindictive has been opened up that will become the default narrative. But Christie will be defined as much by how he deals with this episode as the episode itself.

No one expects -- or really wants -- Chris Christie to morph into a false version of himself.

But how about some elevation -- and some perspective -- that flies way above the traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge?

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Gloria Borger.