Christie: Obama, “Henchmen” Fear Mitt

from a political perspective.” The first-term governor, who endorsed Romney after deciding not to run himself, predicted Newt Gingrich would eventually fade as a 2012 rival.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie believes the onslaught of Democratic National Committee attacks on Mitt Romney is “the greatest thing in the world” for the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign.

“Let’s let the president and his henchmen keep doing it,” Christie said Wednesday at the Republican Governors Association meeting here. “That shows he’s the person they’re most afraid of. And that’s good news for us from a political perspective.”

The first-term governor, who endorsed Romney after deciding not to run himself, predicted Newt Gingrich would eventually fade as a 2012 rival.

“Past is prologue,” he said after a press conference. “Maybe he’ll be different, but every person who has come up and either come near Gov. Romney or risen above him turns out to then have fallen back down.”

“We’ll all have to wait and see,” he added. “Any of us would have lost a lot of money predicting some of the causes of some people’s downfalls in this race.”

Due to the fluidity of the race, Christie said he doesn’t think it makes sense for Romney to directly attack Gingrich, who has surged into first place in some polls.

“If Gov. Romney engaged every person who had a temporary rise in the polls, that’s all he’d be doing,” he said. “Gov. Romney’s job is to lay out his hopeful, optimistic vision for the future of our country and to lay out his critique of the last four years. That’s his job, not to engage [someone] who has a temporary rise in the polls. Under that theory, he would have been engaging Bachmann. He would have been engaging Cain.”

“You guys were wondering whether he should have been engaging those people back then,” he added.

Christie continued to intensify his attacks on Obama as the election year approaches.

“Real leadership is not what you see in the White House right now,” he said. “I think it’s a sad day in our country’s history to have a bystander in the Oval Office, and that’s we have.”

The New Jersey governor, whose talkative and confrontational style contrasts with the cool and buttoned-up Romney, disputed the notion that there’s little enthusiasm on the right for Romney’s campaign.

“If you define enthusiasm as being at 30 percent one day and then eight percent two weeks later, I call that schizophrenia, not enthusiasm,” he said. “The other folks seem to be riding a roller coaster that they don’t know where it’s going to land. I know where it’s going to land for Mitt Romney. It’s going to land with the Republican nomination.”

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