ALBANY — Take my rival — please!
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used Gov. Cuomo’s reputation for prickliness to try to cajole a big Hurricane Sandy aid package out of President Obama, the Garden State chief exec revealed this week.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, you give me this number today, you got a deal,’ ” Christie recalled. “He said to me, ‘That’s a lot of money, Governor.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but we’d have a deal. And if you do it with me today, I got Cuomo’s proxy, and you don’t have to deal with him again!’
“That may have made it more tempting,” Christie joked before a crowd of 900 Garden State pols and lobbyists gathered in DC Thursday night for the annual New Jersey Chamber of Commerce dinner.
Christie recounted meeting Obama at the White House on Dec. 6 while he was in DC lobbying for disaster aid.
Unlike Christie, Cuomo didn’t get an audience with Obama when he lobbied Washington for Sandy aid.
But then again, the Republican heavyweight did Obama a big political favor just before last fall’s election by inviting him to tour storm-ravaged New Jersey — and literally embracing him.
Obama wasn’t invited to tour New York until after the election.
During his keynote speech at the Chamber’s DC dinner, Christie said, “I will end the political portion of this program by thanking the president of the United States.”
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sought $83 billion from the feds. Obama proposed $60.4 billion, and eventually signed a pair of bills — after some stalling by Congress — totaling near that number.
Christie can keep the jokes about his cross-river counterpart — and potential 2016 presidential rival — rolling Monday night when he makes his first appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman.”
The slimness-challenged Jersey boy has himself been the butt of plenty of jokes by the gap-toothed CBS comedian — “327,832” fat jokes by Christie’s own tongue-in-cheek count as documented in a press release from the governor last July.
Letterman once reeled off a Top Ten list of “Ways the Country Would Be Different if Chris Christie Were President.”
Number one: “Scandal when president is caught in Oval Office with Betty Crocker and Sarah Lee.”
Christie and Cuomo are both seen as having presidential aspirations in 2016. And both politicians have made efforts to reach across the aisle to show they can work in a bipartisan fashion.