Speaking to a town hall gathering on Friday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wanted all in attendance to know that he’s a “conservative Republican.” A conservative’s conservative– someone who can conservative his way through any conservative jam, especially when his state is under conservative water and he needs the President to show up to lead the efforts to bail out his conservative ass.
Governor Chris Christie on President Obama and leadership:
“I know when you look at Washington right now, you shake your head at a president who can’t figure out how to lead, at a Congress that only 11 percent of the people in the last poll I saw approve of the job they’re doing,” Christie said during the town-hall event.
“That’s what happens when you have someone in the executive office who is more concerned about being right than he is concerned about getting things done,” he added. “But I’m not going to be that kind of leader of New Jersey.”
This is kind of like looking both ways at a party before telling your racist joke.
Governor Christie is a real tough guy when the President isn’t around.
Back in 2012, Governor Christie had high praise for the President’s leadership in tending to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, while his guy– Mitt Romney– was handing out fake canned good donations and recently revealing that natural disaster preparedness, a coordinated response, and sympathy just aren’t his thing. Christie said of President Obama at the time:
“The president has been all over this and he deserves great credit. I’ve been on the phone with him, like I said, yesterday, personally three times. He gave me his number at the White House, told me to call him if I needed anything. And he absolutely means it.”
He used words like, “outstanding” and “excellent” everywhere he went.
Leadership isn’t running around bullying teachers, and women. Leadership isn’t scheduling a $24 million dollar vacant Senate seat vote to ensure your electoral chances are secure. That’s not “conservative,” either.
And leadership isn’t putting civil rights up for a popular vote, while continuing to openly discriminate against minority groups from a position of authority, as Christie did earlier this week, and throughout his career– most recently when he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down DOMA, calling it, “wrong” and “inappropriate” before pretending to shore up his bipartisan bona fides with a shout out to Bill Clinton for being forced into a position to sign off on the Republican party’s all-too-familiar hostage demands at the time.
It’s funny that Christie praises Bill Clinton’s position of weakness, mistaking it for some sort of courageous, bipartisan stand against gay people.
I’ll take President Obama’s leadership in getting us out of Iraq, regulating healthcare insurance and delivery, steering the economy out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, saving the American auto-industry, getting Bin Laden, standing up to the Citizens United decision, or standing up for women and minorities and even finding the time to help lead Jersey out of the Atlantic Ocean over Chris Christie’s bullying, small-time pettiness and rank partisan hackery any day of the century.
Republicans have bullied and peer-pressured him into reinforcing a false narrative. Chris Christie wants to talk about leadership? He can’t even stand up to the crazies in his own party.