Killing with kindness?

From a man who had consistently and pointedly contrasted himself with the inhabitant in the White House, the words were startling to hear.

"The president has been outstanding," Gov. Christie said, and he "deserves great credit," because his administration has been "excellent."

Christie praised President Obama without prompting. Asked about it, he doubled down on the praise. He even did it on Fox News. All this, days before an election in which Obama was running against the guy Christie had spent 13 months campaigning for.

Is this what the savior of the GOP sounds like?

To ears stinging with the shrill of partisanship, Christie sounded devoted to his state, concerned about protecting his people, and apolitical. From Sandy-ravaged swaths of New Jersey to swing counties of Pennsylvania, his name had messianic appeal.

Jill Spotts, 47, an unemployed event planner from Upper Southampton, Bucks County, told Inquirer reporter Jennifer Lin she was reluctantly voting for Obama. But, Spotts volunteered, "I'd vote for Chris Christie right now!"

Likewise, a firefighter on Sandy-beaten Long Beach Island, Jay Zimmerman, told Christie when he visited Wednesday: "I wish you were running last night."

With only 1,457 days until Election Day 2016, maybe Christie's unapologetic bipartisanship is a formula to lead the party back to the White House. Maybe the party sees a need to broaden its base beyond white men. Maybe an antiabortion Republican who doesn't talk about abortion, a gay-marriage foe who favors civil unions, an antiunion guy who doesn't try to take away all benefits is the kind of moderation the GOP needs.

Christie has called those who opposed his nomination of a Muslim judge "crazies," has acknowledged climate change is real, and has offered alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent drug crimes.

He's even feuded with Sarah Palin.

And yet, despite the sour grapes tossed his way by conservatives upset about his new BFF Obama, the record shows the governor has been plenty tough on the president over time. Accusations to the contrary would be swiftly swatted down by quick-lipped Christie - or in TV ads showing Christie using Obama as a foil.

In 2011 on NBC's Meet the Press, he contrasted Obama's ineptitude in dealing with a GOP Congress with his own ability to get public-worker benefit reform through a Democratic Legislature: "If you're the executive, you've got to be the guy who's out there pushing and leading."

And at the Republican convention, Christie's keynote address repeatedly - to the point of some anonymous grumbling in the Mitt Romney camp - listed his successes governing New Jersey compared with the lack of leadership in the Oval Office.

Until 2016 comes, this would seem to make Christie the leader of the bruised moderate wing of the GOP. But . . .

"He's not going to be an ideological leader of any wing of the Republican Party," asserted former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican who has known Christie since he was a teenager.

"Pragmatist" is how Kean describes the governor. "He intends to make government work, and he doesn't want ideology to interfere with that."

Kean longs for the party of yore, of Lincoln, T.R., and Eisenhower, as opposed to the "adherence to a strong ideology" that "is a reason that you don't have a Republican Senate" today.

Yet Christie will have a tough time ascending to that pantheon of Republican presidents, says political scientist Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, thanks to what he calls the "wet kiss" Christie landed on Obama.

"Anger fades," Sabato said of the GOP, "but the elephant has a long memory."

Christie campaigned more this year for down-ballot candidates than he did for Romney - backing, for example, conservative Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who can return the favor and sway hard-right voters in an Iowa presidential caucus.

But that might not matter, Sabato said, because party activists will forever blame Christie.

"Republican analysts have attributed a big part of Obama's victory to Sandy, and they always throw in Christie," he said. "It's not what's true - it's what's perceived to be true."

If Christie does become leader of his party's moderate wing, Sabato predicted he will just be another Jon Huntsman.

Remember him?

Exactly.

Christie says he's not thinking of 2016. His mother, knowing she had an ambitious son, always told him "first things first."

"And so I'm going to continue to do the job I have now as best as I can, first things first," he said last week, "and the future, whatever it is, will take care of itself."