Chris Christie actually showed up in New Jersey, but it was just so that he could be interviewed in front of the snow.
Chris Christie is shamelessly pulling pages out of his Hurricane Sandy playbook by attempting to use the deadly east coast blizzard that has killed 14 people to boost his presidential campaign.
Video:
Transcript via CNN’s State of the Union:
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TAPPER: Up in New Hampshire, Marco Rubio, with whom you have been exchanging a lot of words, said that — I guess he was joking — that the storm would at least freeze the federal agencies from creating regulations. It would freeze Obama’s veto pen.
As somebody who is having a hands-on experience with the storm, I wondered what you thought of that.
CHRISTIE: Well, that’s a difference between a United States senator who has never been responsible for anything and a governor who is responsible for everything that goes on in your state.
Fourteen people died across the country. And that shows a real immaturity from Senator Rubio to be joking as families were freezing in the cold, losing power, and some of them losing their loved ones. But I don’t expect that Senator Rubio would be able to understand that, because he’s never had to make a decision of any consequence at all that he’s had to be held accountable for.
Voting yes or no in the United States Senate every day, sitting where they tell you to sit, coming when they tell you to come, leaving when they tell you to leave, it sounds like school to me, and not like the kind of job that the presidency is.
So, unfortunately, I’m not surprised that Senator Rubio made those kind of ill-advised comments. That shows his level of preparedness for the presidency, I suspect.
Christie made these comments as he was standing in the snow after he had rushed back to New Jersey to pretend like he was there to govern during the storm. Gov. Christie could have said that Rubio’s joke was inappropriate, and left it there. Instead of offering a dignified answer, Christie decided to use a blizzard that has killed 14 people as a talking point on executive leadership.
Chris Christie exploited the deaths of dozens and the misery of thousands to sell himself to voters. This should sound familiar because it is exactly how he tried to use Hurricane Sandy as a launching pad for his White House ambitions.
Gov. Christie spent 261 days or 72 percent of the year traveling outside of New Jersey in 2015. The governor was not even in the state for nearly three-fourths of 2015. Christie scampered back to New Jersey to get in front of the national television cameras when he thought that he could use a blizzard to boost his flatlining presidential campaign.
For those of you who are keeping score at home, a governor who doesn’t show up to work in the state that elected him was criticizing a senator who doesn’t show up for work in the Senate because he would rather run for president.
The fact that these two deadbeats who are stealing taxpayer money for work that they aren’t doing think that they are qualified to be president speaks volumes about the state of the modern Republican Party.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
