Governor Christie: Let me conclude with two things. First off, not only do I have some old political friends here who I’ve known for a long time and I appreciate you all coming and being supportive. Not only do I have my wife here for her fifth town hall appearance out of 132. But I’m riding here for my last set of meetings before I was coming and I’m in the car and I had a couple of conference calls I had to do so I was doing those. I get done with the conference calls and I had about six minutes before I was going to arrive here where I had absolutely nothing to do. This is an unusual thing, so I get on my phone and I log onto my Facebook page and what do I find when I get onto my Facebook page, but that a number of my high school classmates decided to come and invade the town hall meeting today to show support to their old high school classmate. Members of the Livingston High School Class of 1980, stand up, stand up, stand up. Come on. You’re close enough, you’re close enough. Now, now these are good friends, right? We in like two weeks, three weeks, are having our 35th high school reunion. No, don’t applaud for that. I mean 35 years, Jesus, it doesn’t seem that long ago. They all look a lot better. They obviously have aged significantly better than I have. But it’s great to have friends who knew you when. One of the things that can become really difficult in a job like this is you kind of start to lose touch with reality, right? I mean think about it. Today I went to my office in Newark, I got into the elevator and four state troopers got into the elevator with me. I was by myself and four troopers got in with me. I looked at the trooper who’s in charge of my security today and I go, is today the day someone’s going to try to kill me? There’s four of you in this elevator and there’s only me. Please tell me exactly what’s going on here. They told me I had nothing to worry about that they knew of. And I don’t get to drive myself anywhere anymore, which given the way I used to drive is probably a blessing. But I get driven everywhere, so no matter what, like on the weekend all of you know go and do your errands on the weekend that you don’t get to when you’re working all week, right? You go to the bank or you go to the drycleaners or you go to the deli. Like I go with two black Suburbans and three state troopers. It’s so subtle, it really is. You know you walk into the dry cleaners and two guys come in in front of you, right? And you’re like, make sure those shirts are done right, you understand? If you do all those things your life can become, you know a bit unreal and these town hall meetings are one of the ways that I try to keep in touch, because also I never go in the front door of anywhere anymore, right? No matter where I go it’s some weird side door and I walk through every kitchen. I know every kitchen worker at every hotel in New Jersey and now a few other states too. You just go through these places—you never go through the front door. I walk through side doors. They got flashlights and I’m walking up rickety stairs and then all of a sudden I walk in and there’s a room of 350 people. Oh hi how are you. You never go through the front door of anyplace anymore. All the things that are normal in life kind of get pared back away, so the town hall meeting idea sprung from in 2010 me talking to my staff about how concerned I was about not being able to be in touch with real people anymore, to only see either elected officials or important people who are donors or are elected officials in other states and not getting the real feeling from people, not hearing from real people in the state who I work for every day. That only gets attitude when I have people who knew me well before I was Governor and well before anybody thought I was going to be Governor. Now, this is a unique opportunity for all of you today because I made them stand up. They have stories about me that if they tell them they’re dead, it’s over. It’s over. So they’re here today. One of them was raising their hands. The guy who was raising his hand to ask a question, I wouldn’t have taken a question from him when I was president of the senior class at Livingston High School let alone while I’m Governor of New Jersey...

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