Chris Christie feels the love in Iowa
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MARION, Iowa -- At 3 p.m. on a Thursday, well after any lunch rush had come and gone, MJ's Restaurant in Marion was teeming with activity.
Local Republicans filled seats at nearly bare tables -- a coffee mug here, an iced tea there -- and dozens of reporters loitered, all waiting to see Gov. Terry Branstad and his potential-future-presidential-candidate guest, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, making his first trip to Iowa since 2012.
The whole scene initially felt like an awkward first date: Iowa Republicans, still puzzling over what went wrong in their last presidential election, being wooed by an attractive new suitor and urged to move on.
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Vic Klopfenstein had ended up at this particular lunch joint by coincidence and decided to stay for the spectacle, but he was still hung up on a former flame.
“Is there a rumor mill out east about Mitt Romney running?” Klopfenstein, a former Marion mayor, asked. “Or the two of them together…” He trailed off wistfully, considering a Romney-Christie ticket. “They'd be unstoppable.”
A large share of Iowa Republicans still have reservations about Christie, and one-third have already decided they dislike him, an NBC News/Marist poll released Thursday showed.
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“That's not bad,” Christie said when confronted with those numbers. “I'll take it.”