BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

First. Chris Christie.

As I predicted back in 1957, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced at a press conference yesterday that he would not be a Republican candidate for President in 2012. He said 27 times that he has only been Governor for 20 months and didn’t think (a) he could turn his back on the people who voted for him and (b) he could leave before the job of fixing the state was done.

This was widely seen as a poke in the eye of Sarah Palin who (a) resigned as Governor of Alaska as soon as she got her first paid speaking gig and (b) wasn’t Governor long enough to know what the problems of Alaska were; much less care about fixing them.

Who does this help and who does this hurt?
 
The conventional wisdom is Christie’s decision helps Romney. Maybe it does, but if Christie had gotten into the race he would have taken on the Rick Perry role in the next election: The untested front-runner who may not have meant what he’d written in his book about Social Security.

Romney hasn’t been the general target of the other seven candidates since Perry got into this race as he was in the first two debates. Romney is perfectly happy to have someone else be the leader – much likc in a short-track bike race when the leader has to (you should pardon the expression) break wind for his/her teammates.

Since Perry announced on the afternoon that the late, lamented Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll he has learned that there is nothing minor enough to be ignored by the Eastern Press if you aren’t from the East.
 
Beginning with the third debate, Perry has been the self-described Piñata leaving Romney free to counter-punch when necessary and just be quiet when optimal. If Christie had gotten in, he would have taken on the Piñata role and Romney would have had another three or four weeks of looking and sounding Presidential while the big guns turned on Christie: What cases did he bring when he was a U.S. Attorney? What cases did he ignore. Which ones did he win? Which did he lose? Who did he hang with in high school? College? Law School?

New Jersey is a pretty small (but intense) state on the East Coast of the United States. There is a big country west of the Cumberland Water Gap and there is a big world outside the U.S. Getting in this late Christie would not have had the opportunity to think through water issues in northern California nor monetary issues in India. He might have gone from being a really good Governor to a really bad candidate for President.
 
If you watched his presser yesterday you had to come away with the sense that here was a man who was comfortable with his decision. At the same time Chris Christie was holding court in Trenton, new Apple CEO Tim Cook was announcing an upgrade to the iPhone 4 which was not named the iPhone 5.

Don’t think this was a big deal? According to PCWorld.com, if you had trouble getting updates on this morning’s Apple keynote, you weren’t alone. Almost every major tech news site suffered at least some downtime during the introduction of the new iPhone 4S.

I have not read of any general or political news site going down because of pressure to find out whether or not Chris Christie was running for President.

I have been a Blackberry guy since Blackberrys looked like pagers on steroids. My current device is the one with the trackball which gets gunked up and won’t move the cursor properly. I’m done with Blackberry. On Friday, when I can pre-order an iPhone 4S, I’m doing it. I may pretend it’s New Year’s Eve and stay up until midnight so I can be among the first.

No Christie. No iPhone 5.

Woe to Me.