christie is suitable. you ve got brian ballard quoted in the miami haerld. this guy as a person is horrific. 90% of major romney fundraisers outside the new york/new jersey metro area wouldn t touch christie with a ten-foot pole right now. so how s that intro going? it s not going so well. but what he s saying there goes back to a real deep division between the romney camp and christie. apart from the charges that have come forward on chris christie, which as you well point out still have to be explored and examined in a lot of ways, there is in this controversy, in this scandal a confirmation for some republican donors and some republican activists of a concern that was always there about chris christie. that is that this guy seems to come with very, very hard edges with a very self-serving approach to politics. and even if he is not ever charged with, you know, any
he probably will be fine in the long term if nothing else comes out but a report out this morning six times as many people were commenting on facebook about this than they were about the steroid scandal or about justin bieber or any other pop culture thing. people are paying attention to this. he is a celebrity. he made himself a celebrity. we got somebody on the other side of the table, obviously, that you ve done, john, extensive reporting on this clash between the romney camp and christie camp, and specifically the vetting process that the romney people went through and the information they couldn t get from chris christie, suggestions from a lot of people reading that these sort of issues would rise as we move closer to 2016 and we have something again that probably makes those romney people go, well, we think there is a lot more of that out there. also that this is just the kind of thing they were worried about. not this thing specifically. they didn t know about this but
people say that meant most to them personally, care about people like me, that question. it s always a very important question, it s more important than ideology sometimes with swing voters, and you thought 47% he lost touch with that. explain. yeah, and i think the important part was not just it was politically inappropriate, something he shouldn t have said out in public, but something that really the campaign shouldn t have thought. and my point was going back and doing research, back to 1980, because i think many in the romney camp tried to parallel their campaign very much like the reagan campaign in 1980 against jimmy carter thinking, you just make it a referendum on the incumbent, the economy is so bad, voters will put someone in new, and what they missed was reagan had an aspirational message, and i listed some in my book a reagan speech in 1980, if you re living in poverty, we ll lift you out of it. we want to give you hope not based on the government but on the optimism of
you look at the intangibles. christie s health and temperament and easy to see why the romney camp was spooked by him. it s christie s response and even publicly, none of this was new. john corzine can t make the case of a fact the way somebody else did. outside the state of new jersey. by new jersey standards, chris christy is fairly clean. how will that play in the living rooms of iowa and new hampshire? you just made yourself part of rand paul s advertising. by new jersey standards. the scandal there, it s interesting when he talks about the blue jersey, i have to appeal to democrats. the more relevant factor is
chris christie who does seem to be a teacher bully. which side of chris christie is more real? i think he says what he thinks. that teacher that you re talking about accused him of saying that schools were failure factories and, in fact, he has said that. but he never said they all were. he said some of them need to be fixed. so i think some of his critics maybe go a little too far with that kind of thing. but, so let s go over to you, ryan, because there is this new book out, the sequel to game change called double down. and one of the things they talk about is the vetting of chris christie by the romney team and they talk about his financial responsibility involving him or his brother, things about character. what do you make of all of these stories? well, i mean, first of all, the fact that it would leak out shows that he doesn t have any friends in the romney camp, and that s not surprising to anyone, you know, if you remember how the campaign ended with chris christie em