The American Debate: Hey, tea party, meet Chris Christie

During his Reagan Library gig Tuesday night, Chris Christie fueled or dampened speculation that he may or may not be revisiting or reconsidering his decision or nondecision on whether his heart tells him whether he should lean toward or away from running for president in 2012.

Or something like that.

At this point, perhaps the Christie-parsers in the press corps, and all the Republicans who are so eager to anoint him their latest savior, might unearth a more definitive message if they took the audio version of his Tuesday speech and played it backward. Sort of like what the baby boomers did with Beatles records in 1969, when they sought to divine via secret lyrics whether Paul McCartney was dead. Anyone have a better idea?

Actually, Christie has good reason to balk at a 2012 bid. He looks like the perfect candidate only because he's not in the race. If he were, he would be pulled from his pedestal and torn apart by many of the same Republicans who seem so besotted.

It's a mystery to me why conservatives and tea partyers pine for his entry. Yes, he's great at yelling and acting ticked off; he's viscerally in sync with their anger. And yes, he has slashed state spending and fought the public unions. But he flunks all kinds of right-wing litmus tests. And for those sins, he would surely get booed at Republican debates.

If Rick Perry - the anointed conservative savior just seven weeks ago - gets booed because he inoculates kids against a cancer virus and because he offers in-state tuition rates to the children of illegal immigrants, then how do you think Christie would fare when the purists wake up to the reality of his record?

Take, for instance, his stance on Muslim Americans. He refused to feed the conservative hysteria over the "Ground Zero mosque" in Lower Manhattan; more recently, he appointed a Muslim American to a state judgeship, and denounced the Islamophobes who attacked his decision. He said the criticism was "crap" fueled by "ignorance." He said, "I'm tired of dealing with the crazies."

Imagine what would happen if a questioner read those quotes to Christie in front of a Republican debate crowd? Some of those folks have already booed a gay soldier who was serving his country; one shudders to think how they'd greet a candidate who defends Muslim Americans against "crap" circulated by "crazies." And if Christie were to lash out at the boo birds - after all, he always vows to give as good as he gets, "Jersey style" - the savior halo on his head would implode.

His stance on immigration would be just as problematic. Perry has failed the tea party purists in part because he won't build a fence across the entire Texas-Mexico border. Imagine the outcry were they to learn that Christie favors what he has called "a commonsense path to citizenship" and that he refuses to characterize illegal immigrants as criminals. As he said in 2008, while serving as a U.S. attorney, "being in this country without proper documentation is not a crime" - a remark that prompted conservative hero Lou Dobbs to call for his resignation.

It gets worse. If Christie showed up on a debate stage, he'd be asked to explain his stance on global warming. He recently said that "climate change is real" and that "human activity plays a role in these changes." He said that "when you have over 90 percent of the world's scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it's time to defer to the experts."

Well. You simply cannot say such things out loud in tea party company. You can't voice respect for science and expect to win the Republican nomination. Heck, Perry has failed the litmus-testers even though he shares their animus toward science; imagine how they'd react if they heard those Christie quotes, or learned that he opposes drilling for oil off the Jersey coast, or learned that he was the first Republican in 30 years to be endorsed by the New Jersey Environmental Foundation.

And consider his stance on guns. It's a conservative axiom that guns are synonymous with Freedom, yet Christie favors "commonsense" gun control (strike one) and defends New Jersey's assault-weapons ban (strike two). When he showed up on Fox News in 2009, and voiced his support for "some of the gun-control measures we have in New Jersey," host Sean Hannity replied: "Bad idea." A Republican debate audience would likely voice its displeasure in cruder fashion. "Commonsense" gun control might not sound like a radical concept, but conservatives think it's code for gun seizures by Big Brother.

No wonder Christie prefers to play peekaboo. He can't sustain this game much longer - filing deadlines for the primaries are imminent - but it's way more fun to be exalted for being perfect than eviscerated for being impure.