Christie on Time's Fat Joke: 'Who Cares?'

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After his dominant re-election victory, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appeared on Fox News Sunday, ABC's This Week and CBS's Face the Nation to campaign for 2016 talk about the Garden State's future, the controversial Time cover, and his Romney vice presidential snub. The boisterous New Jersey politician who many believe is a front-runner for the Republican 2016 ticket refused to address any rumors about presidential plans on Fox. "What I’m interested in doing is being the governor of New Jersey," Christie said, when asked about his 2016 "interests" by host Chris Wallace. "The fact is we’ve got a lot of things to do, a lot of things to focus on, and I know everybody’s going to be speculating on what may come on my future and lots of other people’s future in our party," he said. Christie said he's "focused" on governing New Jersey and chairing the Republicans Governor's Association. Over on ABC, Christie spoke about his experience with other another politician's bid for the White House: the ol' Mitt Romney campaign. "First off, political advice from people who ran the Romney campaign is probably something nobody should really give a darn about, so let’s start with that," Christie said, when This Week host George Stephanopoulos asked him to respond to criticism from Romney staffers that appears in Mark Halperin and John Heilmann's Double Down. "But secondly, all these issues have been vetted and if I ever run for anything again, they’ll be vetted again." A Romney campaign staffer says Christie's record gets ugly once you go "below the surface," as the team learned during the vice presidential vetting process. Christie chalked it up to a Washington insider trying to get himself famous off his name. "If you’re in public life that’s what you have to understand. But listen to Governor Romney, and what Governor Romney said when he spoke last week was that none of this caused him any pause at all and so I’ll take Mitt Romney’s interpretation of all this, rather than some, you know, paid political consultant who was, you know, trying to make himself famous obviously in the book," he said. Christie also responded to the Time cover that inelegantly called him an elephant, and the outrage that followed. "Who cares, I mean, seriously. I'm on the cover of Time magazine, you know?" Christie said on Fox. "It is certainly not the first weight joke that has been thrown my way over the course of the last four years."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is already trying to submarine Chris Christie's presidential dream, because he has so many successful campaigns that make him an authority on the subject. Perry started questioning Christie's record and whether it would be best for national Republicans on ABC's This Week. "He was a successful governor in New Jersey? Now does that transcend to the country? We’ll see in later years and months to come," Perry said. "Is a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country?" Perry asked. "We’ll have that discussion at the appropriate time." But Perry thinks the door is wide open for him to re-enter national politics. "Second chances are what Americans have always been about," Perry said. 

Secretary of State John Kerry promised all things were being considered during nuclear negotiations with Iran on NBC's Meet the Press. "This is the first time that the P5 had come together with this kind of a serious set of possible options in front of it with a new Iranian government," Kerry said Sunday. The lead negotiator with Iran got ahead of criticism that the U.S. was about to cut a bad deal just for the sake of cutting any deal at all. "We all have said, President Obama has been crystal clear. Don't rush. We're not in a rush. We need to get the right deal," Kerry said. "No deal is better than a bad deal. And we are certainly adhering to that concept."

Sen. Lindsey Graham refused to drop his nomination hold-up threats over Benghazi during his appearance on CNN's State of the Union. "I’ve been trying for a year to get these interviews without holds," Graham said. "I don’t want to hold anybody … Congress has an independent duty to find out what happened in Benghazi." Host Candy Crowley politely pointed out that CBS's 60 Minutes Benghazi report, which prompted his latest round of nomination hold threats, was false. Graham stubbornly refused to budge. "Oversight is important," he said. "I’m trying to perform oversight, I’m not trying to prosecute a crime."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

Connor Simpson is a former staff writer for The Wire. His work has appeared in Business Insider and City Lab.

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