Christie: NRA Ad on Security for Obama Children 'Reprehensible'

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), who has been campaigning for the media’s new favorite Republican, is now making his journey toward the dark side complete with a misguided assault on a new ad from the National Rifle Association. The NRA ad points out that President Obama is more than happy for his children to have security guards, but thinks that proposals regarding more security in schools for other children is out of the question. Christie said today:

To talk about the president’s children, or any public officer’s children, who have not by their own choice, but by requirement, to have protection, and to use that somehow to try to make a political point is reprehensible …. To somehow feel, as it said in the commercial, “Well, the president has armed bodyguards for his children but thinks it’s not good enough for your children,” the president doesn’t have a choice …. It’s awful to bring public figures’ children into the political debate. They don’t choose to be there. For any of us who are public figures, you see that kind of ad and you cringe.

Of course, nothing Christie said undermined the main point, which is that public figures’ children earn massive security details – and rightly so, since they deserve protection. Other children deserve protection, too, and for Obama to mock that notion is hypocritical.

And naturally, Christie said nothing about the president trotting out seven-year-olds to attempt to imply that Republicans are heartless monsters who prize gun ownership over the lives of children.

But Christie has found his sweet spot with the media. It’s a spot formerly occupied by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), both of whom parlayed that spot into a presidential nomination. Christie no doubt has similar ambitions. But the conservative base will not be fooled again by a media-seeking demagogue more interested in cameras than in effective policy.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).