Is Chris Christie the future of the Republican party or its past?

With sky-high approval ratings and a campaign war chest that ballooned to over $2m in just the 36 days since he announced he was running for re-election, Christie seems poised to lift the Republican brand with as much panache and soulful lip-quivering as he lifted the spirits of his constituents in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Christie's recent apostasies – bashing GOP House speaker John Boehner, his fulsome election-eve embrace of Obama – as well as his bluff, jocular mien have the pundit class (self included) singing his praises, even as conservative stalwarts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck attempt to excommunicate him from the party. So, is the rotund Garden Stater a regional anomaly or the next Republican presidential nominee? And does his fundraising prowess give him the power to shape the GOP's national agenda or is he simply the most recent winner of the "Morning Joe" primary? (Past recipients of its zero delegates include Jon Huntsman and Michael Bloomberg.)

As a snarky sort with a progressive bent, I get Christie's appeal. In the aftermath of Sandy, his brazen sentimentality and brusque rejection of Republican talking points resonated with anyone who was sick of campaign rhetoric and simply heartbroken by the reality of the storm's destruction. More generally, Christie is winningly self-deprecating about his weight; he has cast sensible doubt on the wisdom of putting armed guards in our nation's schools (he has been dubious about gun "rights" historically as well); and he had the good sense to embrace early and often the nation's second most popular black Democrat, Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

And I think I've heard he's a Springsteen fan – a designation which puts him in the front row alongside the rest of the Washington media elite.

Hard-right Republicans' displeasure with Christie only pushes people like myself further into the throes of infatuation. New Jersey resident, torture enthusiast and sharia doomsayer Andrew McCarthy's one-man jihad (ahem) against Christie alone is enough to prompt a potential write-in campaign among the New York Times' editorial board.

Conservative wrath against Christie, however, raises two obvious questions about the New Jersey governor's future, and one not-so-obvious one. First, is it possible for the party to cast out a former convention keynoter and much-beseeched 2008 would-be candidate? Second, is it a good idea to even try? Off the top of my head, I'd say it's probably not possible to forcibly remove the "R" from Christie's identity, no matter how many working-class anthems he knows the words to. As for the usefulness of the exercise, see above. The more that deep-red ideologues try to paint Christie blue, the more purple hearts will melt.

Which brings us to the less discussed and a more subtle inquiry is this: what is everyone so upset and/or excited about? Conservative upset has a way of occluding Christie's most obvious immoderate views. He has an abysmal record on unions and worker protections. In itself, this is not a politically deadly stance, but the legislation his office has put forward along those lines came directly from the Koch brothers-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), an alliance that puts him in the same league as Tea Party favorite Scott Walker. He's taken an at-best ambivalent approach to gay rights: he vetoed marriage equality legislation in favor of demanding a voter referendum. This seems all the more backward given that marriage equality already enjoys high approval in his state.

Christi is also anti-choice to the point of vetoing $7.4m in women's health funding because it would have benefited New Jersey Planned Parenthood clinics. When it comes to economic policy, he favors low taxes for the wealthy and has joined other Republican governors in the largely symbolic refusal to participate directly in the insurance exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

Most damningly of all, but hardly to be found in the reams of Christie coverage recently published, is Christie's faithfulness to the New Jersey tradition of patronage and lawmaker-lobbyist revolving doors: he's a former registered lobbyist himself. One of the consequences of his adherence to the state's relationship with private prison operator Community Education Centers is another sort of revolving door: this one for the hundreds of prisoners who regularly depart the company's cheap-but-poorly-supervised halfway houses where about 40% of New Jersey's prison population resides at one time or another.

None of this makes Christie a bad guy or even a bad politician; it just makes him a not-terribly-exceptional one. Even his anti-Boehner harangue is less a blow for independence than simply a well-timed channeling of the national mood … Christie is not a student of The Boss for nothing, it seems.