New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Monday night that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s steps toward a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination would have no bearing on his own decision about whether to jump into the race, a decision he will make later this year.
Bush’s announcement last week that he was “actively exploring” a run was a blow to Christie’s ambitions because the two men will be competing for many of the same donors as they test their viability as candidates. But Bush will be leaning on a far deeper network of financial supporters that came together to back the winning presidential campaigns of his father, George H.W. Bush, and his brother, George W. Bush. Many of those donors were intrigued by Christie before the George Washington Bridge scandal broke earlier this year.
During an hour-long interview with Steve Adubato on NJTV, Christie said his decision would be based solely on three factors.
“Is it right for me? Is it right for my family? Is it right for the country … If I answer ‘yes’ to all three of those things then I will run. If I don’t answer ‘yes’ to all three then I won’t,” he said.
Adubato pressed him on how much a run by Bush would affect his plans.
“It’s not one of the three questions,” Christie said with a faint smile. He did not elaborate on his thoughts or make any comments sizing up Bush as competition.
Christie, who has faced many questions about his temperament as he has moved on to the national stage, also waved off questions about whether his brusque and sometimes confrontational manner would wear well over time.
Adubato noted that Christie’s demeanor has in many ways been “his calling card” and how he gets “stuff done,” but asked whether he would modulate his behavior to appear more “presidential. ”
“No,” Christie responded with characteristic bluntness. “Why would I? It’s who I am.”
“If people want somebody different, then if I ever ran for president, they’d vote for somebody different,” he said. “I don’t intend to become a phony to win an election.”
Christie added that members of the public rarely ask him about those traits, and argued that the subject is an obsession of reporters. In a recent incident where he told a heckler to “sit down and shut up,” he noted that many news outlets only ran that sentence without showing him let the man “yell, go on, block the cameras with his signs, speak over me, get booed by the crowd.”
The governor said he told the man that he would talk to him later — a part, he said, that often gets edited out of the footage — but that he stood by his direction to the heckler to sit down and shut up.
“I don’t regret that for one second and I wouldn’t change that part of myself,” he said.
“What you all do,” he said, referring to the media, “is to take that small part and say ‘Look at him, all someone had to do was stand up and something, and bang, he says sit down and shut up.'”
“People like to watch that,” he said. He joked that his sometime unpredictable demeanor was one reason why people were tuning in to Monday night’s hour-long interview.
“I don’t think they’ve seen me punch you yet,” he said to Adubato. “But they live in hope.”