Republican Politics and Chris Christie's Decision not to Run

There's a lot of armchair quarterbacking going on today in American politics. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's decision not to be a candidate for president in 2012 has created fodder for most political commentators, and even a few businessmen.
The facts behind Christie's decision are simple enough:
1. Christie would never have been able to put together the national team needed to win in any of the major first round battle states - Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida. American presidential politics is a grueling effort to raise money, find competent senior staff and get the grassroots organized, while looking like none of this is necessary.
2. Even if Christie could have performed the organizational miracle called for, he would not have been able to get the core of the Republican Party to vote for him in primaries, i.e., the tea partiers and those to the right of the Tea Party - his positions on abortion, gun control and immigration are not the position of the majority of the GOP.
3. Republicans tend to "dance the last dance" with the girl they came to the prom with, and that means that Christie would have been the inevitable target of Romney's polished campaign apparatus suggesting that it is Romney who has worked the grassroots and gone to the Lincoln Day dinners and raised the campaign money for local and state level candidates while Christie was still trying to be elected for the first time in New Jersey.
Those are tough facts, but they are accurate representations of GOP presidential politics. They explain why Goldwater (1964), Nixon (1968), Reagan (1980), Bush Senior (1988) and Bush Junior (2000) got the party's nod at the nominating convention. All these men worked the grassroots, raised a lot of money for state campaign coffers, knew everybody in every state GOP organization on a first name basis, and were therefore trusted.
Trusted? Yes. To be true to their political position. To be true to their political promises. To support the GOP national platform without wavering. 
Trusted? It's a lot like choosing your sister instead of someone you met yesterday to hold the bungy cord while you jump off the bridge.  
The Democrats take those big leaps. Sometimes they work - Clinton. Sometimes they fail - Obama.   
But, the GOP does not take those kinds of risks. It vets the possible candidates over years and it knows that if they go down in flames, at least it will be familiar flames, not a lightning bolt that hit them unaware.
So, now that he's out, Chris Christie needs to get to work if he wants a future in the GOP as a presidential possible. He has to keep his business and private money backers happy while he proves to the Republican Party that he can be trusted to be their standard bearer. That Christie had enough sense to realize this, as he surely did, is a good start. Herman Cain will need to so the same thing.
And, that's why Mitt Romney, barring the sky falling in (in the person of Herman Cain), is going to be the Republican candidate. He will have the luxury of being able to choose Christie (I doubt it) or Cain (a real possibility) as his vice presidential running mate, and that would give either a golden key into the GOP's heart, and tee him up when Romney's presidency is over. 
Any way you look at it, someone is going to beat Obama. And I think it's going to be Romney.