Go ahead, Governor, jump in. No matter what your wife and kids say, and no matter how many times you promised you wouldn’t.

Because the Republican nominee, whoever it is, has an excellent shot at becoming president, given this economy. And the current field of GOP candidates is just scary.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the front-runner, has more swagger than smarts, and we’ve seen how dangerous that it. That’s how invasions happen.

It is painful to watch him stumble through a debate, as if thinking hard hurts his head. And if you think his view that Social Security is an unconstitutional Ponzi scheme is odd, read his book. He's got hundreds of pages of this stuff.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the runner-up, doesn’t seem to have a soul. He has flip-flopped so many times, you wonder if he would shoot the family dog for a few extra votes in Iowa. He may actually be a robot. No one has seen him really eat one of those corn dogs at the Iowa state fair.

The rest are either irrelevant (Jon Huntsman), dangerously crazy (Michele Bachmann) or just loony (Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich).

And that brings us to Chris Christie. He is the one person who may be able to talk the Republican Party off the ledge where the tea party has pushed it. And tonight, he has the ideal stage to do so: the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Like him or not, Christie has scored some big wins as governor: pension and health care reform, a cap on property taxes, reform of the rules on union negotiations.

New Jersey is still badly broken, but these reforms put bandages on the worst wounds.

And here’s the big point: Christie compromised to get bipartisan support for each of these reforms, just as Reagan did over and over.

"He is extremely smart, and he knows when to make a deal," says state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, the top Democrat at the table. "I’ve got to give him his due. There has been a great deal of compromise."

The Republican Party has veered grotesquely off course since President Obama took office. It now regards compromise as treason. And Reagan would be appalled at that. He is a hero to conservatives today, but they are not really his heirs.

Reagan raised taxes several times. He signed a broad amnesty for illegal immigrants. He pulled the Marines from Lebanon in the face of a truck bombing. He was conservative, yes, but he was a realist.

Like Reagan, Christie brings strong credibility on spending and taxes, and like Reagan, he has gotten things done because he’s willing to compromise in the end.

Would Republicans buy that? Maybe not. But given the stakes for this country, Christie should be willing to risk everything to take that shot.

Do I have reservations about this? A suitcase full of them.

Christie is a vindictive bully, and if he reaches the Oval Office, he could turn out to be Richard Nixon’s heir, not Ronald Reagan’s. One example: In his budget, he killed a college internship that was founded by a scholar who sided with Democrats in the redistricting fight. Ick.

He knows little about foreign policy, so he’d have to pick a running mate to plug that gap. (Is Colin Powell looking for a gig?)

He has the familiar Republican blindness to the needs of the poor, and he’s trashed women’s health programs.

He takes way more credit than he deserves. The secretly recorded tape of him talking to a Koch brothers gathering in Colorado in June was comical in its self-worship and factual distortions.

He picks fights when he doesn’t have to, as when he mistakenly called Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver a liar and never apologized. Full disclosure: The man hates my guts for saying this kind of thing, despite my support for the bulk of his agenda. The last time I asked him a question at a news conference, he hissed, "Get a life," and stomped away with his security guards.

So yes, I’m concerned about being waterboarded if he becomes president. For me, President Obama is the far safer bet.

But Christie, like Reagan, is a conservative who will push hard to get what he wants, and then take a breath and cut a deal. That puts him at the top of this class.

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