I said earlier that Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio made very different bets on the (first; there will be more) fiscal cliff compromise.

Well, the third major contender (right now; don’t tell me things are in flux and it’s way too early – I know that, but that isn’t stopping Rubio from visiting Iowa and Christie from pushing his way into national television), Chris Christie, has taken that bet and is putting his chips on the same hand as the one Ryan assembled.

Christie is betting that competent, reality based and compromise-based governing will be a winner in 2016. I mean, it will almost certainly be winner in the general election (real compromise; not ‘moving a miniscule fraction over from from the most extreme right and calling that compromise’ compromise). What the bet consists of is the hope that primary voters will forgive such things in the hope of putting forward someone who could conceivably win a general election – which is not where the GOP is right now, but everyone pretty much agrees they need to inch over in that direction if they ever want to be more than a frighteningly angry mob shouting in a large room in front of C-SPAN cameras on the south side of the Capitol building.

We’ll see.