I tend to agree with Bill Maher that Christie is “350 pounds of toast,” and that he should have run for president in 2012 when he had “that new candidate smell” because “the longer you stay in the more likely some bad thing will stick to you.”

Many Republicans on Capitol Hill, already fed up with Christie’s grandstanding on Sandy and his election-eve embrace of President Obama, are casting about for a different presidential contender. The newly constrained Christie is taking a pass on dinner at the White House this Sunday, the better to avoid another photo op with the president.

Americans are so disgusted by political polarization that the minute Christie hugged Obama, he seemed like a white knight.

But in The New Republic, Alec MacGillis argues that the image of Christie as an independent bull in a china shop was never accurate. MacGillis’s reporting shows that Christie worked within the state’s political machinery at the same time as he was setting himself against it — that his strategy all along was to use his power as a corruption-busting prosecutor to bring down many Democratic officials, even as he cultivated bonds with the Democratic bosses left standing, with their influence enhanced.