THE CONTRAST TO THE UR COULDN'T BE STARKER:

The Answer Is No: New Jersey governor Chris Christie is denying money to teachers and tunnels, oxygen to Democrats, and intentions to run for president in 2012. Which is only making him more popular. ( Jason Zengerle, Nov 21, 2010, New York)

These are strange days for Republicans. After their historic midterm victories, they are seemingly ascendant, with George Will hailing 2010 as “conservatism’s best year in 30 years—since the election of Ronald Reagan.” And yet there is no Reagan-like figure to lead them. In Congress, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are Establishmentarians ill-suited to the fervor of the times. The Republicans who are currently angling to run for the White House in 2012—Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, John Thune, to name a few—inspire little enthusiasm. Sarah Palin, the one potential presidential candidate who does get Republican pulses racing, is such a polarizing figure that the party Establishment is terrified she’ll run. At the very moment that the GOP appears poised to return from its short sojourn in the political wilderness, the party is desperately searching for a leader. Which explains conservatives’ serious—and sudden—infatuation with Chris Christie.

His own ascendancy has been an unlikely one. A lobbyist and political hack who parlayed his fund-raising for George W. Bush into an appointment as New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, Christie didn’t wow anyone with his 2009 gubernatorial campaign, which was impressive mostly for its lack of content. He promised to cut spending and taxes but adamantly refused to offer any specifics as to how he planned to do so, leading many to assume that he wouldn’t. Running in a three-way race, he won 49 percent of the vote largely because of who he was not—namely the unpopular and hapless Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where seldom is heard a discouraging word about Republican politicians, predicted that Christie would “arrive in Trenton with a mandate to do what he campaigned on—nothing.”

But Christie, 48, has upended those expectations. In January, on his first full day in office, he announced that although the Corzine administration had projected a $500 million surplus, New Jersey was actually facing a more than $1 billion deficit in the budget that ran through June, which he would later revise to $2.2 billion. By March, the state would be broke. “The Democrats in New Jersey, they were rubbing their hands with glee,” Christie recalled in a recent speech. “ ‘This guy promised on the campaign not to raise taxes, he’s gonna have to do it now, he’s gonna have to do it immediately.’ And they couldn’t wait.”

In February, Christie appeared before a joint session of the Legislature to deliver an emergency address about the budget. The tradition in Trenton has long been for the governor to provide legislators with an advance copy of any speech to a joint session. But Christie recognizes the value in holding information close, so when legislators showed up for Christie’s emergency budget address, they found no speeches sitting on their desks. “That was the first time that ever happened,” Senate president Steve Sweeney told me one recent afternoon in his office behind the Senate chamber. “It was really over the top.” The effect was more than just theatrics. Standing before the astonished Democrats, Christie announced that he was circumventing the Legislature by signing an executive order to impound more than $2 billion in unspent funds for local school districts, hospitals, and public transit—thereby bringing the budget into balance. “It was a sucker punch,” Barbara Buono, the Senate majority leader, says. Christie would probably dispute the sucker part of that characterization, but not the punch. “When I left the joint session of the Legislature, they were dizzy,” he now boasts. “They didn’t know what to do.”

Christie continued to keep the Democrats off-balance during negotiations over the next year’s budget. In March, he went before another joint legislative session to present a $29.3 billion spending plan that made sweeping cuts to state government while not renewing a one-year income-tax surcharge on people making more than $400,000. “Mark my words today: If a tax increase is sent to my desk, I will veto it,” Christie pledged. Two months later, after Democrats passed legislation renewing the surcharge, he did. Then he dared the Democrats to put the surcharge renewal in their budget legislation—which, because he pledged not to sign such a budget, would cause a government shutdown. “I said to them, ‘Listen, here’s the deal,’ ” Christie recalls. “ ‘If you close it down, I’m going to get in those black Suburbans out front, I’m going to ride back to the governor’s residence, I’m going to go upstairs, I’m going to order a pizza, I’m going to open a beer, and I’m going to turn on the Mets. And whenever you decide to reopen the government, give me a call and let me know.’ ” The Democrats caved—ultimately allowing the Republicans to sponsor their own budget bill and move it through the Legislature. “Governor Christie got the Democrats to basically abdicate their role as the majority party in the Legislature,” says Jay Webber, an assemblyman and the GOP state chairman. “Despite our being in the minority, we effectively controlled the budget debate. It was remarkable.”

“I am setting the tone.” The Moorestown town-hall meeting was over, and Christie was now leaning his frame on a giant butcher block in the building’s kitchen and explaining to me how he approaches his job. Christie suffers from asthma, and his boasting was punctuated by heavy breathing and frequent swigs from a water bottle. He seemed less a politician leaving an event than an athlete coming off the field—or Rex Ryan, that other larger-than-life New Jersey character, standing in a victorious locker room.

He has set the tone, in part, by being “a strong governor who has opinions and is willing to express them,” he said. When I asked him about New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg’s criticism of his decision to cancel the tunnel, Christie shot back, “All he knows how to do is blow hot air … so I don’t really care what Frank Lautenberg has to say about much of anything.” Anything? “I’m always willing to read something in the paper that he said, and if he makes sense, I’m happy to work with him on it. I haven’t found one yet.” Christie believes his aggressive approach sends a signal to everyone else in the state. “The tone I’m trying to set for New Jersey is: action. Less talk, more action. And I think that’s what I’m doing as governor, and I think we’ve gotten a lot of stuff done already because of that, because I’m pushing and pushing and pushing.”

Much of the push comes from Christie’s willingness to exercise the enormous powers the State Constitution vests in his office—even the seldom-used ones. In May, angry about what he viewed as a liberal and “out of control” State Supreme Court, he refused to reappoint a sitting justice whose seven-year term was set to expire—an action that, despite being constitutionally permissible, no governor prior to Christie had ever taken. He especially relishes vetoing the meeting minutes of the more than 60 state authorities and commissions, ranging from the Turnpike Authority to the Maritime Pilot & Docking Pilot Commission, having vetoed more minutes in ten months than Corzine did in four years. Joe Kyrillos, a Republican state senator, says, “He understands and is not afraid to use the strength of the office to force outcomes in a way that other governors haven’t.”

Christie also exercises his power in less public ways. His control over his fellow Republicans in New Jersey is such that Steve Sweeney complains, “There’s no need to even have Republican legislators anymore. Once he decides something, they vote with him.” He’s achieved that loyalty partly with carrots. In the months between his election and his inauguration, Christie proved a quick study of New Jersey’s byzantine appointments system and did a masterful job of preventing Corzine from rewarding his supporters with plum spots on authorities and commissions—something almost every lame-duck governor has done. “It was an elaborate chess game,” recalls a former Corzine aide, “and he beat us at every step.” That meant those coveted appointments became Christie’s to dole out to his allies.

Not that he’s above cementing party loyalty with sticks. Republicans who have expressed doubts about various parts of the governor’s agenda have swiftly been brought into line with threats of retribution such as withholding fund-raising assistance or denying them their preferred judicial appointments. “He rules with an iron fist,” one Republican legislator told me. “If you’re a team player, he’s with you, but if you’re not, you’ve got problems. He’s vindictive, and it gets personal. He holds most of the cards, and he’s not afraid to play them.”

Christie has been most Machiavellian in his dealings with Democrats. Cory Booker, the Newark mayor once thought to be the Democrats’ best hope of beating Christie in 2013, now seems ill-suited for that role given his partnership with Christie to overhaul Newark’s schools—a Felix-and-Oscar act the two have taken all the way to the set of Oprah. “The governor holds the keys to every door that Booker needs unlocked,” a mayoral adviser explains.