I sit here in a snowstorm. My house has been without power for 10 days because of the hurricane. i'm checking my text messages for anything from missing friends with houses closer to the surge-hit areas in Monmouth county. I'm wondering if I'll find someplace tomorrow to get enough gas to make it to work. I'm hoping and praying that the trucks I hear driving by outside are coming to fix the downed poles on my street. And I'm reading some comments on a major conservative blog on how Chris Christie's comments about Obama's help with relief efforts make him "dead" to mainstream republicans.

I am sorely vexed. 

Chris Christie didn't cost Romney the election, nor did he win the election for Obama. Chris Christie did what he always does: his job. He's the governor. Half his state looks like New Orleans after Katrina. He's putting his energy, efforts and yes, his political clout into the effort to help the people who elected him, and the people he represents. 

Chris Christie isn't dead. The Republican party is dead. Christie is just fine. The best the GOP could come up with, faced with a president so weak on fiscal policy and foreign affairs that a WET PAPER BAG (of which we currently have plenty, here in NJ) could have beaten him, was Mitt Romney. 

Seriously? The best and brightest of the GOP is a somewhat-left-of-sort-of center former governor from a liberal New England state with a track record that has more switches than Penn Station, a horrible personality deficit that he struggled mightily (and, frankly, admirably during the debates) to overcome, and - on the issues where Obama was weakest - policy positions that were largely indistinguishable from the past 12 years. He had great business experience, but he had absolutely no conservative credentials whatsoever. He certainly displayed no serious limited-government impulses beyond the again vague promise to stop government interference in business that - correctly or not - was widely perceived as code-speak for still more crony capitalism. 

Seriously? Mitt Romney essentially ran on the "I'll do things vaguely different from Barak Obama, but not touch YOUR entitlements and somehow miraculously put you back to work" platform. He made smart moves with the debates, and a brilliant VP choice (who, somehow, mysteriously vanished during the last month of the campaign, yet managed to emerge victorious in his own congressional re-election run - talk about hedging your bets!) He performed admirably in the polls. 

But Romney didn't win, because he lost states he needed to win. And he didn't lose those states because of a picture of Stan and Ollie embracing on a washed-out beach. He lost them because, yet again, the GOP has produced a candidate that is so undifferentiated that, other than indistinct promises to "repeal Obamacare" and insincere-seeming nods to a few social issues, I cannot find within my mind any clear idea of how a Romney presidency would be substantively distinguished from Obama's.

I don't know what the next four years will bring. I'm not likely to vote for the next GOP presidential candidate. But I do know this: if the future of the GOP looks like Mitt Romney, it's dead. And if there's no place for Chris Christie in that party because he did his job as governor of a state that suffered an unprecedented natural disaster, then that's a good thing, because Christie is the kind of guy who I believe will find a place in national politics, and wherever he ends up, I'm far more likely to give them my vote than I will the party of Mitt the Undistinguishable.

I don't like everything Christie does. His position on guns is horrible (It's understandable, seeing that he is both a former prosecutor and a governor of a gun-hostile blue state, but it's not excusable.) His position of drug prohibition perpetuates the government-sanctioned thuggery of professional law enforcement. But, on balance, he's a good governor, considering the recent history of that position in New Jersey.