Republican Chris Christie launches 2016 presidential campaign

Christie said that he has spent the last 13 years as a US attorney and governor “fighting for fairness and justice and opportunity” and he now wants to do the same for the country as a whole.

“And both parties have failed our country”.

Just one day after announcing his campaign for president, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made a stop in Maine to receive an endorsement from fellow Republican Governor Paul LePage.

While his friends and most loyal supporters cheered his declaration for president inside the gym at Livingston High School, foes of Gov. Chris Christie assembled on a field, behind a temporary fence about 200 yards away from the building, and called for his resignation. He faces a hard challenge regaining his ex- status near the top of the heap.

After striding along the ravaged coastline with Democratic President Barack Obama and chiding Republicans in Congress for delaying help for Sandy victims, the pragmatic Christie romped to re-election in the largely Democratic state.

At the time, Christie, a lawyer, was a long-shot primary challenger of the well-established New Jersey Senate Majority Leader John Dorsey, who had held the Morris County seat for 16 years.

He also took a verbal swing at Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, who was Obama’s first secretary of state.

(AP Photo/Charles Krupa). A boy shoots a video of Republican presidential candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a town hall meeting in Sandown, N.H., Tuesday June 30, 2015.

Christie declared his candidacy for the 2016 GOP nomination at a rally at his old high school in New Jersey Tuesday and went directly to the early-voting state of New Hampshire, which is seen as crucial to his pathway forward.

The Bridgegate scandal, a lagging state economy and fights over pension issues have dramatically lowered the governor’s approval numbers, and political analysts say that has hurt him nationally.

The bombastic politician said his intent was to present voters with a dose of “truth about the problems we have” in the United States when he hits the campaign trail. The closed lanes, which were usually open to access the George Washington Bridge and New York City, caused massive traffic back-ups for about five days. Christie’s office was accused of closing the lanes as political retribution against a local mayor who didn’t back Christie’s re-election. But Christie was never implicated, and has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of the scheme. “If Washington and Adams and Jefferson believed compromise is a dirty word, we’d still be under the crown of England”.