Sharpens attack

Christie sharpens attacks on Rubio in New Hampshire

By Nick Gass

Chris Christie slammed Marco Rubio on Tuesday for missing last week's vote on the omnibus spending bill, arguing that it highlights a distinct difference between the two candidates vying for the Republican nomination.

Christie, who is betting big on New Hampshire, has been sharpening his attacks on Rubio — a ripe target for Christie considering that the Florida senator holds only a slight edge over Christie in the state.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" from Portsmouth, Christie said he's got much stronger leadership skills being a governor in Newark as opposed to a senator in Washington.

“When you’re governor of New Jersey, you don’t like spending, you use the line-item veto and you line-item it out and you make the argument to people. You show up and get the job done," he said. “This is an important position. You say you oppose spending but you do nothing about it. That should tell people something about what kind of effective leader someone might be. You have to figure out ways to do it. He should have shown up on the floor and made his case to his colleagues against that bill if he was so opposed to it. He didn’t, and that is a huge substantive difference between us."

In explaining his absence from the Capitol last week, Rubio told CBS News that "in essence, not voting for it is a vote against it."

Earlier in the interview, co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Christie, who was sitting in his campaign bus, if there had been "any sightings" of Rubio in New Hampshire, giving Christie the opportunity to tout his campaign's presence in the state ahead of the Feb. 9 primary.

“No, no. We’ve been looking for Marco, but we can’t find him. We’ve had the bus all over New Hampshire. We haven’t been able to find him. We understand he did a very quick town hall here and then left to go back to Madison Avenue in New York," Christie said.

"Oh my gosh, he sounds like an elitist," Joe Scarborough said, referring to the Florida senator's latest fundraising appeal which called the "Morning Joe" co-host an "elitist" for his tweets about Rubio's ad which said this election is about "all of us who feel out of place in our own country."

"Marco goes full-on nativist. Says he feels out of place in his own country. It's such a crass play. It's offensive," Scarborough tweeted Dec. 15 in sharing the ad.