Governor Christie On Morning Joe Six Months After Sandy

Morning Joe - Six Months After Sandy, 4-29-2013. (Transcript Below) "I've lived here all my life and I know the people here. I'm one of them, and the fact is I knew that people were down and hurting in the days afterwards but I knew that folks would just pick themselves up and get back to work and that's what people have done, and the progress we've made in the last six months has really been extraordinary." What do you say to your right wing critics...? "I say the same thing to all of my critics no matter where they are in the spectrum. That is I have a job to do, and the fact is there was nothing else that ever crossed my mind in the days after. You wake up on Tuesday, October 30th. 7 million of your 8.8 million citizens are out of power. There's not a school opened, not a water treatment or wastewater treatment plant is operational. 51 gas stations in the whole state are open. ...I say the same thing to all of them: put yourself in my shoes and if you're a responsible elected official you would do nothing different. Listen, I supported Mitt Romney. I was very vocal about it, but the fact is that presidential politics was not the first thing on my mind that day. It was getting my state recovered and restored." Six months later why is it taking so long? "First of all, we've removed now millions and millions of cubic yards of debris. The things that you're seeing here are now private homes that the folks who own them have to decide what they want to do with them, and so there's a dichotomy between what's happening in the public realm and what's happening in the private realm, but here's the thing: when I was yelling and screaming about why this bill wasn't passed earlier, this is why, because every day you tack on to the front end is a day you tack on to the back end and so literally we still have not seen the aid that we've fought for three months ago. I think we'll probably start to see that aid flowing this week. ...It's going to take a while get the mechanism up to be able to push that money out, and so when Congress delayed on the front end it caused these back end delays." What are the biggest priorities in the context of this disaster that you face on a daily basis? "It's getting people back in their homes. I mean we still have tens of thousands of families that aren't back in their homes, and so job one is to get the grant program going which allows them to rebuild, elevate their homes. Second is for businesses, for the businesses that still haven't reopened to get them business grants that will get them reopened, because all of the other things are back to normal. Power is back on, gas stations back open, all but four schools are back opened from where we were, so those things of normalcy are back but now the economic engine of housing and business has to get back. One of the reasons you came under fire from Republicans was the buddy embrace with Obama in the hour of crisis. How has the President and the White House been since then? "Listen, the President's kept every promise that he made, and the fact is that that's what I was saying at the time. What I was saying at the time was—I was asked how is the President doing and I said he's doing a good job. He's kept his word, and so everybody knows that I have about 95% level of disagreement with Obama on issues of principle and philosophy, but the fact is we have a job to do and what people expect from people they elect is to do their job and that's why they hate Washington so much and you know that Jon. ...They care about just arguing about who's being right and the President's guilty of that, the Congress is guilty of that. What we did, the President and I did at the time was we saw suffering together, and when you see that you're either going to step up and be responsible or you're not, and we stepped up and were responsible together, and since that time I have to say everything that they promised they would do they've done and so I don't have any complaints or arguments with them this morning on the issue of Sandy relief." ...somebody whose house has been washed away, who's not sure what their life looks like tomorrow or the month or the year after that. What do you say to those people? "...I look at people and say we're not going to forget you and that nothing is going to get fixed overnight and people know that, but I tell people we haven't forgotten them, and that's the most important thing. I think what people are most scared of is that they're going to be forgotten, that their problems are going to be forgotten, and we won't do that, and so that's what I'd say to them Willie. There's nothing more—don't make promises you can't keep, so I'm just trying to say to them we're going to work as hard as we can to get them back in their homes and when we do their lives will start to get back to a new normal."