Chris Christie: Obama comments on government hiring 'an outrage'

By Josh Lederman - 06/08/12 12:45 PM ET

Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) called President Obama's remark that public hiring is going in the wrong direction an outrage, adding he shouldn't blame governors for the situation.

'When I landed here today in Chicago, I stopped in the airport for a minute because I saw the president was going to come on the air to talk about the economy," Christie told the audience at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

"I said what the heck, I got 10 minutes to waste," Christie said to boisterous laughter from the conservative crowd. "Surprisingly it turned out not to be a waste."

The governor and rising conservative icon said voters don't need to hear anything more from either candidate than what Obama said Friday, when he addressed reporters at the White House about the economy and pushed Congress to act on his jobs initiatives.

"The big challenge we have in our economy right now is state and local government hiring has been going in the wrong direction," Obama said.

Christie argued that New Jersey has more government workers per square mile than any other state, but said the trend is reversing under his leadership. Midway through his first term, the state now has fewer people on its payroll than it has since Republican Christie Todd Whitman was governor more than a decade ago, he said.

"That's the right direction, Mr. President, not the wrong direction," Christie said.

"It is an outrage to have the president of the United States stand up and say to hard-working governors — Democrats and Republicans in this country — that state and local government hiring is moving in the wrong direction, and we're to blame," Christie said.

Christie, an early backer of Mitt Romney, the presumptive presidential nominee, said it was Obama who had put forward a wasteful stimulus that had done nothing to help the economy.

"And then he has the audacity to stand up this morning and say it's the nation's governors and the nation's mayors who are driving our economy down by not hiring enough people for government work," Christie said.