New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, addresses a town hall in Concord, N.H., on Monday. (Photo Credit: Sarah McCammon/NPR)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended Maine Gov. Paul LePage for recently saying drug dealers come into his state to sell drugs and impregnate young white girls. Christie said the comments don’t “change a bit for me my affection for him, as a leader and as a person, and he’s a good man.”
The New Jersey governor, who has made drug addiction a major issue in his campaign, recently campaigned with LePage in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, where he has surged ahead of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and is all but tied with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Christie said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that LePage has apologized and that “we can’t judge people by one set of remarks they make.”
“We all know that he shoots from the hip, and when he does that there are going to be times when even he, in retrospect, thinks he shouldn’t have said,” Christie said in the interview, which will air on Monday.
LePage made the comments while discussing a very real drug epidemic that has been plaguing New England. He said out-of-state drug dealers “with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty–these types of guys–they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home.”
“Half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave,” he added. “Then we have a whole other situation.”
Of course, the basic narrative that LePage was trying to explain–albeit very, very poorly–is accurate. The firebrand governor was reelected in the 2014 midterm elections and has been no stranger to controversy.
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