Josh Barro pushes Chris Christie as Romney’s running mate (via Andrew):

What Romney really needs is a running mate who can get conservatives excited about electing a moderate candidate. And Christie has managed to become a rockstar among conservatives nationally while pursuing an agenda that is in many ways moderate.

Christie has become a star among conservatives nationally, but I suspect this has happened mostly because conservatives outside New Jersey have paid very little attention to how Christie has governed. Conservative media outlets give him good coverage, and they tend to emphasize the parts of Christie’s record that conservative voters will like. If Christie were being considered for the VP nomination, that would change. Coverage of Christie’s entire record would probably dampen the enthusiasm many conservatives have for him. Christie might initially generate enthusiasm and give Romney a brief boost, but he would become an electoral liability before the end. This is also the same man who repeatedly said that he wasn’t ready to be President as recently as last year. A year later, he’s suddenly well-prepared and ready to take over in an emergency because he had a few photo-ops in Israel? Christie has absolutely no foreign policy experience, which compounds one of Romney’s main weaknesses. The attack ads practically write themselves. Choosing Christie would be akin to attaching a time bomb to the Romney campaign.

The danger for the Romney campaign is that the case for Christie is superficially plausible. At the moment, putting Christie on the ticket polls better than adding Ryan or Rubio. He rallies a few more conservatives to the ticket than either of them, and a Romney-Christie ticket unsurprisingly receives more support from moderates than the other combinations. Barro assumes that conservatives already know all about the substance of his record, but are willing to be “flexible” about it because they appreciate his combative style, but that seems unlikely. Conservatives are more supportive with Christie as running mate because the image they have of Christie is that of the man attacking public sector unions and shouting at his critics. Conservatives respond to his combativeness viscerally, but they will probably like him less the more they know about him.

Picking Christie would also be more politically daring than Romney and his campaign tend to be. Christie is already coming under attack for his so-called “Islam problem”, and those attacks would only increase and escalate if it appeared likely that Christie might become the VP nominee. It is possible that the likes of Pipes and Emerson don’t really speak for a very large constituency of conservatives, so their attacks might not peel away many voters, but it would be a distraction that the campaign doesn’t want to have.