Governor spent recent days quietly considering run, sources say Watch video
TRENTON — By Thursday morning, Gov. Chris Christie had all the information he needed.
He came downstairs at his hotel near San Francisco a day after attending a fundraiser and told his closest political confidant in the lobby that he needed to be left alone. "Tell people to give me some space," friend William Palatucci recalled Christie saying.
At the center of the week’s loudest political storm, Christie sought silence to sort through his thoughts.
By Monday night, Christie went to bed knowing his decision: He would not run for the White House in 2012.
"I came back to the same place that I was in," Christie said Tuesday at a Statehouse news conference.
For days, it had appeared that the decision to sit out the presidential campaign — which he had stuck with for a year — was up in the air. But it was something that had been churning in his mind for weeks.
Christie said Tuesday that he didn’t spend the weekend counting delegates or developing fundraising strategies.
"Chris was very private about it over recent days," said state Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-Monmouth), a longtime friend of the governor.
Christie also dismissed the notion that his family was opposed to his running.
"Three weeks ago, Mary Pat woke me up at 6 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘If you want to run, go for it. Go for it and don’t worry about me and the kids,’ " he said.
Christie set off last week on a cross-country fundraising tour, punctuated by an address Tuesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. His dinner with former first lady Nancy Reagan set off speculation that the Republican president’s widow had personally pushed him to run.
Christie refused to say what he talked about with Reagan but called the reporting on the episode "careless."
In fact, Christie refused to divulge much detail about his discussions leading to the decision he came to Monday night. He acknowledged that he had spoken with a few people who had run for president.
Christie was a fundraiser for former President George W. Bush, but didn’t say whether he had spoken with him or the only other living Republican president, his father, George H.W. Bush.
As Christie mulled his decision over the weekend, the calls for him to run got louder, and he said his family received mail from supporters at their home.
A farmer from Nebraska even sent a FedEx to his children asking them to give their father permission to miss their concerts and games because, "they would be remembered in the history books as the people who changed the course of our country’s history," Christie said.
But ultimately, his dedication to New Jersey won out, he said.
"Mary Pat and Andrew and I were out to dinner on Friday night and I had a whole bunch of people come up to me and say: ‘I really hope you run for president if that’s what you want to do, but I’ll really miss you here’ and that did a lot to reinforce what I was already feeling myself," he said.
By Ginger Gibson and Chris Megerian/Statehouse Bureau Staff
Staff writer MaryAnn Spoto contributed to this report.
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