Whoever thought New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie was best-buds with President Barack Obama was sorely mistaken. The possible 2016 Republican presidential candidate took shots at the commander-in-chief for his lack of leadership in Washington.
"Real leadership would get this fixed. You get everybody in the room and you fix it, and you don't let them leave until you fix it," Christie said at a press conference in Jersey City. "That's what real leadership is, not calling a meeting two hours before the thing's going to hit to have a photo-op in the driveway at the White House. That's not real leadership."
The outspoken Christie underscored how he remained dumbfounded that both sides have failed to tackle the root causes of the deficit and debt problem, adding that it "seems to me it should be pretty easy to fix."
Christie tossed off drastic across-the-board federal spending cuts known as sequestration as the latest bad idea to come out of Washington.
"I don't believe that sequestration at one cent on the dollar is going to have grave effect on anybody or that anybody's going to notice it all that much, except for some of the federal employees who are going to be furloughed," he said. "We've done much harder things in New Jersey in much shorter periods of time. I think unfortunately the president has overplayed this in a major way. Planes aren't going to be falling out of the sky."
The state has gotten no indication so far that emergency disaster relief funding would take a hit due to the sequester, but he said that's ultimately up to Obama.
"If anybody in this room thinks they understand Washington, D.C., please come on up, stand behind the podium and you give the answers because I don't have the first damn idea of what they're doing down there," he said.
Obama dismissed the notion, on Friday, that he could have - for lack of a better word - sequestered congressional leaders in the Oval Office until they reached a deal.
Christie received flak from his Republican colleagues for praising the president's leadership, and guaranteed aid, to help New Jersey when the Superstorm Sandy hit the Tri-State area last October. Some chided him for not supporting the president's opponent Mitt Romney more forcefully during the campaign.
