AK Forty Seven
Registered: Jul 2010
Posts: 10845 |
01-25-12 03:33 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/n...ch-remarks.html
Palin Chides Christie for Calling Gingrich ‘Embarrassment’
Forget that she hails from a far less densely populated state; with all her moxie, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, could easily be mistaken for a Jersey girl.
And on Monday night, she took on New Jersey’s blunt-talking governor, her fellow Republican Chris Christie, declaring that he had gotten “his panties in a wad” in a “rookie mistake” that reflected a “lack of self discipline.”
Mr. Christie is the most prominent surrogate for Mitt Romney, who now finds himself locked in an increasingly caustic duel for the Republican presidential nomination with Newt Gingrich.
Since Mr. Gingrich’s big victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Mr. Christie has become more aggressive in his attacks, and Sunday on “Meet the Press,” he said that Mr. Gingrich “has been an embarrassment” to the Republican Party.
On Fox Business Network on Monday night, Ms. Palin, who catapulted from obscurity after being chosen as her party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008, insisted that it was Mr. Christie who had perhaps embarrassed himself.
“Poor Chris,” Ms. Palin said. “This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media’s hands. The host had asked Chris, ‘Does Newt embarrass the party?’ I think he asked him twice, and there, Chris played right into it.”
“You know,” she added, “sometimes, if your candidate loses in just one step along this path, as was the case when Romney lost to Newt the other night — and, of course, Romney is Chris Christie’s guy — well, you kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that’s what Chris Christie did.”
Ms. Palin resigned from the governor’s office a year before the end of her first term, and declined to run for president this year. She has not endorsed a candidate herself, but her husband, Todd, has endorsed Mr. Gingrich.
Ms. Palin said Mr. Christie, a first-term governor, had yet to learn that reporters would try to “goad” him into making comments that would play into the hands of Democrats if Mr. Gingrich became the nominee.
On Tuesday, when asked to comment on Ms. Palin’s comments at a town-hall-style meeting in Bridgewater, N.J., Mr. Christie was uncharacteristically terse and took a pass, according to an account on a Web site.
“I don’t have any comment about Sarah Palin,” Mr. Christie said. “At all.”
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