Gov. Chris Christie said he never tires of being asked to run for president, but insists he's still not doing it.
Some of Iowa's top Republican campaign contributors, unhappy with their choices in the developing presidential field, are venturing to New Jersey in hopes they can persuade first-term Gov. Christie to run. The entreaty is the latest sign of dissatisfaction within the GOP over the crop of candidates competing for the chance to run against President Barack Obama in 2012.
Bruce Rastetter, an Iowa energy company executive, and a half-dozen other prominent Iowa GOP donors sought the meeting with Christie, the governor's chief political adviser, Mike DuHaime,
told The Associated Press. The get-together is set for the governor's mansion in Princeton, N.J., on May 31.
“How self-important would one have to be to become tired and annoyed by having people ask you to run for president?” Christie said Monday morning during an interview on a Philadelphia radio
station.
“I'm a kid from Jersey who has people asking him to run for president. I'm thrilled by it,” he said. “I just don't want to do it.”
The planned meeting speaks to what some Republicans nationally say is a lack of enthusiasm about the emerging roster of contenders. It's also unusual because candidates typically court Iowans, who get the first say in presidential nominating contests, and not the other way around.
Christie, who was elected in 2009 and has drawn national attention for his tough talk and battles with Democrats, has explicitly and repeatedly rejected the idea of running for the White House. Yet that hasn't deterred these Iowans.
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“There isn't anyone like Chris Christie on the national scene for Republicans,” Rastetter told the AP. “And so we believe that he, or someone like him, running for president is very important at this critical time in our country.”
Christie, a former U.S. attorney elected governor only 15 months ago, has been adamant and at times colorful in insisting that 2012 is off the table.
That hasn't stopped him from playing a kingmaker role in the race to the White House and having the top-tier GOP contenders over for dinner at the governor's mansion in Princeton, including Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
Jon Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. Ambassador to China and former Utah governor, is scheduled to stop by in the next week, Christie said, adding that he had only met Huntsman once at a White House dinner.
“If I decide to support a candidate for president, I want to make sure I really get to know that person,” Christie said.
And although he swears up and down the Turnpike that he's not running, his comments increasingly sound more tuned for a national audience.
“I'm going to continue to play a role as a leader in our party, I think appropriately so, and I think it's good for New Jersey,” Christie explained. “Clearly that's my goal, to make sure we have a change in 2012.”
When asked whether gubernatorial experience was important for a presidential contender, Christie said he thought it was important to have that kind of combined executive and governmental experience, then took a dig at President Obama, who served one term in the Senate, for lacking it: “I think it's taken him a while to really get the idea how you execute that type of authority.”
Without naming Donald Trump, Christie also said it would be difficult for someone who had no political experience to run because “you are foreign to that world.”
Christie wowed an audience of 800 Iowa Republicans last October when he headlined a Branstad fundraiser in a suburb of Des Moines, the Iowa capital. The former prosecutor's tough-talking “put up or shut up” advice for the party impressed Rastetter, who was Branstad's top fundraiser.
Branstad, who hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate, has sung Christie's praises for his get-tough approach to spending, especially public employee pensions and benefits. He said after
hearing Christie speak in October, “I don't think I've been that inspired by a speech since Ronald Reagan.”
It's inspiration that Florida's Hoffman said is lacking most of all in the 2012 hopefuls, and something their opponent has in plenty.
“Obama is the most masterful campaigner I've ever observed,” Hoffman said. “Our problem is we have a number of candidates who would make great presidents, but very few that make great candidates.”
