Chris Christie has resisted every temptation to run for president, but he’s no longer sure he’d be able to resist the temptation to join the GOP ticket as the vice presidential nominee. If Mitt Romney asked, he just might say yes, he said yesterday.

Christian Heinze of the website GOP12 notes that Christie, the popular sharp-tongued Republican who endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy for president, is now singing a different tune when asked about being on the GOP ticket in 2012.

“If Gov. Romney were to come and talk to me about it, I would listen because I love my party enough and I love my country enough to listen,” Christie said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday.

As Heinze reported on Monday, Christie last year said, “Can you see me as somebody’s vice president? I mean, who would be that poor guy? You know, I just don’t think that my personality is necessarily suited to being No. 2.”

In all likelihood, Mitt Romney won’t ask Chris Christie to be his running mate. No matter how valuable Christie has been to Romney throughout the primary process, Christie wouldn’t diversify Romney’s ticket in the strategic ways a vice presidential nominee should. Like Romney himself, Christie’s executive experience is in a Northeastern, blue state. The white, Anglo-Saxon Catholic Christie wouldn’t do much to attract the crucial Latino vote or to reassure anxious evangelicals.

Then, too, Christie’s year-old remarks still ring true. His strong, forceful personality isn’t suited to a No. 2 position — and to sacrifice him as the governor of New Jersey to sideline him as vice president makes no more sense for the conservative movement at large than it does for Mitt Romney’s prospects of a victory in the general election.

It’s polite of Christie to say he’d consider a Mitt Romney offer — and it’s also a dramatic way to emphasize that he thinks Mitt Romney and no other GOP candidate should be the nominee — but nothing more.