This morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Christie stood by his statement earlier in the week on the Laura Ingraham radio show that Jeb Bush hasn’t “been in a relevant campaign as a Republican since 1998.”
“It’s just a factual statement, he hasn’t been in a relevant campaign since 1998,” Christie told host Chris Wallace. “I tell it like it is, I say what I mean, and I mean what I say, and he hasn’t been. Listen, guys like me, and Scott Walker and Marco Rubio and John Kasich, we’ve been out there for the last six years, fighting the fights for conservative Republicans across this country. Me in New Jersey, fighting against a Democratic legislature every day, vetoing more than 400 bills. Americans for Tax Reform said the other day I had vetoed more tax increases than any other governor in history.”
(He’s close; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, “Governor Chris Christie has vetoed more tax hikes than any other Governor in modern American history.” He went on, “And he made those vetoes stick. Without the Christie governorship, New Jersey would be somewhere between Detroit and Greece.”)
Christie is currently eleventh in the RealClearPolitics average, an ominous sign for the next debate, which will again feature the ten candidates highest in the national polls on the “main” stage, and the remaining candidates at a separate time. (The CNN criteria are actually different from the RCP average, and include polls going back to July, so Christie may be in better shape than the RCP average indicates.)
“I’ll be on the stage,” for the next debate on CNN. “I’m not worried about it.” He also dismissed Trump’s current growing lead in the polls: “Now it’s Donald, in three weeks it could be somebody else.”
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