NEW YORK CITY ARCHIVES

Gov. Christie Stupidly Gets Flak for Praising Obama’s Response to Sandy

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Yesterday, we reported on the media’s tendency to politicize this catastrophe into an electoral issue and how that is a terrible symptom of infinite media. And we continue to see this play out as the Eastern seaboard cleans itself up from some of the worst inflicted damage in recent history. The next victim: Governor Chris Christie.

Here’s the situation: As Sandy ripped through New Jersey and New York City, President Obama made emergency-service declarations for every state in the storm’s path. FEMA and the National Guard were deployed to supplement state and local services on the ground. And Governor Chris Christie did a terrible thing: He thanked Obama for the help after talking to the president three times on the phone throughout the day.

He thanked him in press conferences; he thanked him on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”; he thanked him on Twitter:

Christie will be surveying the damage in Jersey with the president today. And does not want to hear one thing about the election or being too soft on the president.

It seems the main concern, though, with Christie’s nice words toward the president is all the not-so-nice things he has said about him in the past few weeks as a staunch Romney supporter. Except something happened in between now and then: a hurricane that tore New Jersey apart. That’s flip-flopping if we’ve ever seen it!

When asked about a possible meet-up with Romney to survey the land by Fox News co-host Steve Doocy, Christie lashed out on anyone who dared to give his move political undertones: “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested. I’ve got a job to do here in New Jersey that’s much bigger than presidential politics, and I could care less about any of that stuff. . . . If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics then you don’t know me.”

The Romney campaign had no comment.

Then Christie took to Twitter to call out the politicizers:

Amen, governor. As we said yesterday, we’ll worry about the election later. Let’s deal with this damage first.

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