Christie to his party: Must show up to win
N.J. governor side-steps 2016 run
WASHINGTON — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Sunday offered his Republican Party a prescription to win: Show up.
Christie, fresh off a 22-percentage point win for re-election, said the GOP must go into Hispanic and black communities, talk with senior citizens, and campaign in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas. It’s what helped him become the first New Jersey Republican in a quarter century to capture more than 50 percent of the vote.
It also has done nothing to tamp down chatter about a 2016 presidential bid, something many have encouraged.
“I know everybody is going to be speculating about what may come in my future and lots of other people’s future in our party. But the fact is, I am focused on being the governor of New Jersey and being the chairman of the Republican Governors Association,” Christie said on Fox News Sunday, one of the four television news shows he appeared on Sunday. “And I think those two jobs will keep me pretty busy over the next year.”
It’s the year after that dominates conversations among Republican operatives, donors and rivals.
Asked directly whether he would serve all four years of his second term, which starts in 2014, Christie hedged: “Listen, who knows? I don’t know.”
Republicans are searching for a candidate who is true to the party’s beliefs, can appeal to voters in swing-voting states and can help the party win the presidency for the first time since 2004.
Christie’s win Tuesday made him an appealing option.
“I got 61 percent of the vote in the state of New Jersey in a blue state that had just re-elected Barack Obama a year ago by 17 points,” Christie said. “That was nearly a 40-point turnaround between voting for a Democrat at the top of the ticket and voting for a Republican.”
Christie attributed his win to reaching out to traditionally Democratic demographic groups.
“Getting 51 percent of the Hispanic vote, I’m very proud of that,” he said. “Because I’ve worked hard with the Hispanic community to let them see how our policies can help their families. I’ve worked hard with the African-American community. I’ve worked hard with seniors and students.”
Christie said the reason for his win was simple: better-than-average showing at the polls from minorities and Democrats.
“If you want to win a vote by that kind of margin, if you want to attract the majority of the Hispanic vote, if you want to nearly triple your African-American vote, you need to show up, you need to go into those neighborhoods, you need to campaign in places,” Christie said.
Exit polls say Christie also carried one-third of Democrats and two-thirds of those who called themselves independents.
That’s not to say Christie is a natural fit for the GOP. He has favored an overhaul to the nation’s immigration laws that includes a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million foreigners living in the country illegally. He is not opposed to some gun-control measures. And he’s been critical of some of the Tea Party’s most popular figures in Washington.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a 2012 presidential contender who is weighing another White House campaign, said voters would have to judge Christie’s record as he visits early nominating states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“Is a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country?” Perry said in an interview taped during a visit to Des Moines, Iowa. “We’ll have that discussion at the appropriate time.”
Should Christie pursue a 2016 White House bid, his economic record will be among the areas scrutinized.
As governor, unemployment in New Jersey fell to 8.5 percent in August, from 9.7 percent in February 2010. That’s still 1.2 percentage points higher than the U.S. average for August, and tied for the seventh-highest among the states.
In Double Down, a new book about the 2012 campaign, it was written that Republican nominee Mitt Romney decided against picking Christie as his running mate because there were too many “red flags” tied to his previous career as a lawyer whose work included lobbying for the securities industry.
“All of these issues have been vetted,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week. “If I ever run for anything again, they’ll be vetted again.”
Christie pointed to Romney’s defense of him after reports about the book.
“I’ll take Mitt Romney’s interpretation of all of this, rather than some paid political consultant who was, you know, trying to make himself famous, obviously, in the book,” he said.
Asked on ABC about a reference to an elephant on a cover of Time magazine, Christie said he ignores jokes about his weight.
“If I’m bothered by jokes about my weight, it’s time for me to curl up into the fetal position and go home,” he said.
During his interviews, Christie was mostly subdued in his criticism of the Democratic president, except on the issue of health care.
“The fact of the matter is the president didn’t tell folks the truth about what was going to happen with their own private insurance policies,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And what I urged them to do for the last two weeks, when I’ve been on the campaign trail, is tell people the truth. That’s the thing they expect. And I think that’s why we’ve gotten the support we’ve gotten in New Jersey.”
Christie declined to weigh in on foreign policy, including his thoughts on how the Obama administration and Secretary of State John Kerry should proceed on a potential Iran nuclear deal amid reports that talks have broken down. He said he wouldn’t comment until he has more information.
“The people who are involved in this on a day-to-day basis should be making these opinions known publicly,” Christie said on CBS’ Face the Nation program. “I’m the governor of New Jersey.”
All the media attention Christie has won in recent weeks hasn’t gone unnoticed by his potential 2016 Republican rivals.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky last week called Christie a “moderate,” a term not typically embraced by the conservative wing of the Republican Party that tends to dominate the nomination process.
On Fox, Christie said he plans to stay above the “garbage” coming from Washington, such as another recent spat with Paul in which the senator said Christie had a conflict of interest in appearing in a $25 million federally funded “Stronger Than The Storm” ad campaign.
Even before his re-election, Christie had sparked some ill will within his party stemming from his willingness to appear with and praise high-profile Democrats.
He joined Bill Clinton in June at the former president’s Global Initiative conference in Chicago, where the two had a friendly onstage discussion about natural-disaster policy.
Republicans were especially critical of Christie for accompanying Obama on a tour of the New Jersey shore last year to inspect damage caused by superstorm Sandy. The governor lauded the initial federal response — words some said gave the president a pre-election boost against Romney.
Some party colleagues also were aggrieved when Christie criticized Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives for delays in approving federal assistance in Sandy’s aftermath.
Christie will also face a challenging governing environment in New Jersey, as he contemplates a potential White House bid. His political reach didn’t extend to the Democratic Legislature, where Republicans picked up just one Assembly seat.
During his first term, state lawmakers blocked Christie’s efforts to reshape the state Supreme Court and cut taxes, and sidestepped his opposition to same-sex marriage and a minimum-wage increase. Among his second-term priorities, Christie has said he’ll push for more charter schools and vouchers.
The governor has also said he’s open to some gun control. In his first term, he approved tougher penalties for illegal gun possession and barred those on federal terrorism watch lists from purchasing firearms. He also vetoed a ban on the sale of .50-caliber rifles and rewrote a Democratic measure that would expand instant background checks, saying the state didn’t have the technology to implement it.
“Every time we see one of these incidents happen across the country, it is almost always exclusively with a deeply disturbed person at the helm,” he said on Fox. “What we need to do is be much more aggressive about how we deal with mental health issues in this country.”
Christie spoke to Fox News Sunday, NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face the Nation. Christie and Perry appeared separately on ABC’s This Week.