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Republican Tea Party voters have done everything short of propping up a Bernie as they cast about for anyone, dead or alive, who can prevent the GOP presidential nomination from going to Mitt Romney.

Their resistance to seeing the ex-Massachusetts governor carry the party banner in 2012 may soon give way to resignation now that Chris Christie has become the latest would-be candidate to spurn pleas to run.

Mr. Christie's announcement on Tuesday was not exactly a shocker. The first-term New Jersey Governor and rising GOP star had spent the past year insisting he is not ready to be president. Any realist would agree.

Still, non-stop wooing by a cross-section of Republican strategists and grassroots supporters, and rumours that Nancy Reagan herself had urged Mr. Christie to reconsider, had given new life to his potential candidacy.

Mr. Christie smartly snuffed out those hopes: "Now is not my time. I have a commitment to New Jersey that I simply will not abandon."

There are many other reasons to believe Mr. Christie made a wise choice for himself and the country. His future is brighter for it.

Mr. Christie was smart enough to figure out that voters vet actual candidates more rigorously than hypothetical ones.

Texas Governor Rick Perry might have shown some of that circumspection when he was the subject of the same kind of wooing by Anybody-but-Romney Republicans a few months ago.

He might have recognized that much of the wooing stemmed from anti-Romney sentiment rather than any enthusiasm for Mr. Perry himself, who was an unknown quantity outside his home state.

Instead, Mr. Perry seemed to believe all the hype about himself – that he was the real conservative deal who would expose Mr. Romney as the fraud. But he soon discovered that Tea Partiers can be a fickle and unforgiving lot.

Mr. Perry floundered during the two latest GOP debates. He was caught in his own contradictions as he sought to explain his support for subsidizing tuition fees for illegal immigrants in his state and mandating the vaccination of sixth-grade girls against a sexually transmitted infection.

Ironically, those positions only made him more appealing as a general election candidate. But

Mr. Perry has lost nearly half of his overall support in the past month, slipping to just 16 per cent among all Republicans. Mr. Romney has held steady at 25 per cent.

The Perry deserters appear to have embraced Herman Cain, the former CEO of a national pizza chain and the only African-American in the race. His plain-talking conservatism and gift for evocative metaphors has undeniable appeal, leaving him tied with Mr. Perry in second place.

But there is little to indicate Mr. Cain could withstand the same kind of scrutiny that has cast Mr. Perry's candidacy in a more realistic light, or compete head-to-head with a rival as deep-pocketed as Mr. Romney.

Indeed, with Mr. Christie bowing out, Mr. Romney's path to the nomination becomes clearer. It forces uncommitted donors off the sidelines as the race crystallizes into a Romney-Perry showdown.

"Those campaigns that haven't put together the resources or infrastructure are going to find they are trying just to build an organization while the Romney campaign is fine-tuning its organization," noted Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist and informal adviser to the Romney team.

Mr. Romney might not be any grassroots Republican's dream candidate. But he increasingly looks like their best shot at the White House.

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