Governor Chris Christie told the Cato Institute that "looking for love" in a position of leadership will not solve fiscal problems.

Governor Chris Christie at Town Hall Meeting
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“When you’re looking for love in this job, that’s when deficits get run up,” Christie said according to ABCNews.com. “When you’re looking for love in this job, it’s because you can’t say no to anything because someone somewhere won’t love you if you do.”

Taking the stage to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, Christie said he knew he would not be loved as Governor of New Jersey to do what he needed to do to balance the state's budget and had to touch some of the so called “third-rails” in politics. The Republican called the slashed budgets “common sense reforms, but tough ones.”

 

“They said this was going to be impossible to do but we did it,” he continued, “And we did it because we went out to the public and we told them why it was so important.”

Christie boasted his budget plans eventually drew the support of his Democratic-controlled state legislature, including its leadership.

“Don’t tell me the American people are not ready to hear the truth. They know our government’s out of control, they know our debt and our deficits are out of control. And don’t confuse them liking the solution with accepting it.”

Christie said when presented with the facts, voters “know in their heart” to accept the right solution.

The Governor also ventured into national issues saying that “political sideshows” threatened to deteriorate America’s standing abroad.

“There’s no better way to prescribe other societies around the world to become more democratic and more market oriented than to show that our democracy, and our markets, work better than any other system,” he said.

Christie delivered keynote address at the Institute's dinner in Washington D.C. to award a Chinese activist, Mao Yushi, with their Milton Friedman Prize for his work advocating a Western-style economy in Beijing.

He also had to endure yet another joke about his weight. Cato President Ed Crane joked that he had been “swapping diet recipes with the governor" according to the Star Ledger.

This time, Christie didn’t miss a beat: “He hopes that by next year’s dinner that he’ll look as damn good as I do,” the governor said of Crane.

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