Chris Christie

So he made the safe call, using a press conference in Trenton to say that he’d felt obligated to consider pleas from Republicans to enter the race but that “the deciding factor was that it did not feel right to me, in my gut, to leave now when the job here is not finished.” But when you look at what, exactly, he’s saying no to, it raises the question of whether Christie made a smart call. Just consider what the Republican presidential race now looks like.

There’s Mitt Romney, who’s the nominal front-runner and the safest-seeming general election option for the GOP. But Romney has been running for president with all his might for six years now, and he can’t seem to break 25 percent in national polls. Romney’s profound vulnerability was confirmed when Rick Perry entered the race in mid-August and immediately overtook Romney, building a comfortable double-digit lead. It’s only because Perry has performed so poorly as a candidate that Romney has managed to retake the lead, but even that comes with an asterisk: Almost all of the support that Perry has lost in the last few weeks has gone to second-tier fringe candidates (Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, mainly) instead of Romney. The newest poll, from ABC News and the Washington Post, has Romney at 25 percent, followed by Cain and Perry at 17. This is a sad commentary on Romney’s standing within his own party.

And let’s look closer at Perry, because his freefall may be even worse than that poll suggests. There’s also a new survey in Florida, released yesterday afternoon, that has him plummeting to fourth place — with just nine percent, behind even Gingrich. The promise of Perry’s campaign was that he’d instantly and permanently unify conservatives, who had been desperately seeking a credible alternative to Romney. Instead, he’s unnerved them with overheated campaign trail antics and a series of mediocre to brutally bad debate performances. And he’s failed so far to provide them with a satisfactory cover story for his own ideological baggage, which has actually allowed Romney — yes, Romney — to tout himself as the candidate of consistency.

Nor is there any reason to regard Cain as a threat to win the nomination, despite his recent return to prominence. He has no discernible strategy (and doesn’t even plan on being in Iowa for more than a month!) and just lost his press secretary … to a campaign for lieutenant governor. And when the spotlight was on him earlier this year, he demonstrated an alarming lack of basic foreign policy knowledge. The more attention Cain gets now, the more likely he is to wilt — again. The same is doubly true for Gingrich, who is essentially waging a one-man campaign with no money or organization. His recent polling success is the product of a few strong-seeming debate performances, but if you think he’s on the verge of becoming a contender, just remember: He’s unusually prone to self-destruction. 

This is the field that Christie would have been running against. Already, without even lifting a finger, he was running at 17 percent nationally, according to a just-completed Quinnipiac poll, tied with Romney for first and ahead of Cain (12 percent) and Perry (10). And while it wasn’t quite as rosy for Christie, the ABC/Washington Post survey has had him at 10 percent.

Some believe it would have been all downhill from there, and maybe they’re right. But think back to that question-and-answer session Christie did at the Reagan Library last week, the one that ended with the woman begging him to run, and the crowd responding with a standing ovation. The performance was vintage Christie. In off-the-cuff-settings — town halls, debates, interviews — he is one of the strongest, most compelling communicators in American politics today. Like him or not, he’s a lot more than the caricature of rage that many mistakenly assume he is. He generates positive personal feelings from audiences, particularly Republican audiences; they like him and they want to be with him — and if that means rationalizing away a less-than-conservative past position or two, they’ll do it. Romney and Perry and most other politicians on the national stage today just don’t have the same effect on people.

What’s most amazing is that the value of the Republican nomination is only increasing, even as the party’s nominating process looks more and more like a farce. Given the state of the economy, just about any candidate the GOP nominates will have a real chance of defeating Barack Obama and becoming president. And yet the party is stuck choosing between Romney and Perry. Oh, and maybe a pizza guy, too. 

Among New Jersey politicos, Codey said, the sense is that “it’s more likely that he’d run today as opposed to two weeks ago. When you’ve got Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and all those Republican bigwigs calling you, saying you’ve got to do it for the party, you’ve got to do it for the country — it’s intoxicating. A lot of people would get drunk off that.”

“I think as each day goes by and more and more people ask him to do it, the more flattered he is … and it makes him more likely to do it than not, in my opinion,” Codey said.

Earlier this week, Christie claimed in a speech at the Reagan library that his state has become a national model of bipartisan productivity on his watch. “Our bipartisan accomplishments in New Jersey have helped to set a tone that has taken hold across many other states,” he said. “This is the only effective way to lead in America during these times.”

Codey laughed at this, noting that the votes that have allowed Christie to push much of his agenda — including a controversial overhaul of the state’s public employee pension system — through a Democratic Legislature came from loyalists of a pair of regional party bosses with their own parochial and personal interests.

“It’s not bipartisan,” he said. “He’s made deals with two party bosses who deliver their employees’ votes. That’s not bipartisanship.”

If anything, Codey said, Christie’s governorship has polarized the state, with some voters rallying around his pugnacious, in-your-face style and others fiercely resenting it. “We see with white males over 50, he’s cleaning our clocks — no question about it. But females? No, not at all.”

A poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University this week showed men approving of Christie’s job performance by a 2-to-1 margin, with the governor barely breaking even among women. Overall, Christie’s approval rating stands at 54 percent, a marked uptick from earlier in the summer — and an obvious result, Codey said, of the fact that Christie “was on TV every 10 seconds” during Hurricane Irene.

If Christie were to win the Republican nomination, “it would be a battle for him to win New Jersey. We’re still a blue state,” said Codey. And among minority voters, “you’d see a turnout like you’ve never seen for Obama — it would be both a pro-Obama vote and an anti-Christie vote.”

Christie’s shaky home-state standing could complicate any decision on a presidential bid. To win the governorship in 2009, Christie strained to project a moderate-to-conservative image, something that could come back to haunt him in a national GOP race. But any pandering to national GOP audiences could send his New Jersey numbers plummeting, and make it even more difficult for him to come back to the state after a presidential loss and run for reelection in 2013.

“He’s moved to the right, without question,” Codey said. “The question is if he’s moved far enough right to satisfy those people in South Carolina, Mississippi and other states that are very far right. And I think that remains to be seen.”

And, he noted, there’s a flip side to Christie’s feisty style: “He’s got very, very thin skin” — something that could get him in serious trouble on the national stage. “I mean, just one time during a debate if he goes off and says the wrong thing — and he’s certainly capable of that — he could be down the tubes.”

Codey, 64, has himself been talked up as a potential Christie challenger in ’13. Seven years ago, he was the little-known president of the state Senate when Gov. Jim McGreevey abruptly resigned because of a bizarre gay sex scandal. Codey was next in line for the governorship, and racked up sky-high popularity during his 15-month run. But his party’s bosses, with whom he’s long had acrimonious relationships, united behind Jon Corzine and effectively blocked Codey from seeking a full term.

Still, he remains quite popular; the new FDU polls shows him in a dead heat with Newark Mayor Cory Booker for the ’13 Democratic nomination, with every other prospective candidate far behind. He said he’s focusing on his own reelection to the state Senate this fall — redistricting tossed him into a new, more Republican-friendly district — and that he wants “to see how this whole thing plays out with [Christie], and then make up my mind.”

While he wouldn’t vote for Christie for president, Codey said he wouldn’t necessarily be upset if he ran and won. Why?

“Because then we’d get a new governor.”