As I started to write this piece, Republicans and Democrats were aquiver with apprehension about whether New Jersey governor Chris Christie would seek the Republican presidential nomination. I wrote that if he did, he would be seeking to duplicate the feat of perhaps the president he least resembles in all of American history: Woodrow Wilson, who successfully sought the presidency after just one term as New Jersey’s governor. And then, of course, Christie declared he would not be a candidate.

While Wilson had been, as president of Princeton University, one of America’s most famous academics and education reformers, Chris Christie has toiled in the much less promising and virtuous vineyard of the U.S. prosecution service. But the presence at the head of his nascent organization of Ken Langone was reassuring: Langone is a great American who, as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, approved compensation for Exchange president Richard Grasso, only to endure false attacks from the infamous New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer for doing so.

In the face of Spitzer’s assault, a wide swath of Wall Street’s great and good defected, reneged on the compensation they had agreed for Grasso, and skulked shamefully away. But Langone stuck to his guns, was vindicated in ignoring Spitzer’s attempts at intimidation, and for good measure even made a takeover bid for the NYSE. I considered this to be rivaled only by the 90-year-old Kirk Kerkorian’s apparent preparedness to make a takeover bid for General Motors as the classiest move by a major American financier in the last decade.

If such a brave and successful combatant against the prosecutocracy as Ken Langone is happy with Governor Christie, I feel I have no standing to hang back. The embryonic Christie candidacy was also unique in the quality of its other visible supporters: eminent financier Paul Fisher, and Henry Kissinger, America’s greatest secretary of state since Gen. George Marshall, if not John Quincy Adams. As far as I have been able to observe, none of the other Republican candidates has received the endorsement of anyone except a few fellow pols.

Christie was also the only one of the near candidates still in possible contention who had the advantage of a recent, still-unfolding track record as a deficit-beater, in a large-population state that was an economic and fiscal basket case when he took it over less than two years ago. It has been a very frustrating election-campaign run-up so far, because the country is suffering the greatest decline in its history.

Public finances, as well as the education, justice, and much of the health-care systems are in shambles; official environmental policy is nonsense; and in foreign affairs, apart from tentative progress in Iraq and Afghanistan and against terrorists, nothing useful is happening. Tyrants, as in Iran, are appeased; nuclear proliferation into the worst possible hands is treated with passivity; and democracy, as in Honduras, is contested. A sizeable majority of Americans has given up on the Obama administration, but the Republicans, up to now, have been implausible.

This frustration is accentuated by Christie’s success in balancing the state budget and facing down the teachers’ unions — which, apart from being the beneficiaries of unearned and unaffordable largesse, are also chiefly responsible for the collapse of the public-education system. Christie’s accomplishments would have made his a uniquely timely CV among the Republican candidates.

Dealing with towering deficits and accumulated mountains of debt is the most urgently needed skill in a presidential candidate now. Perry has a respectable record, but bankruptcy avoidance in vast and oil-rich Texas is hardly comparable to catastrophe-avoidance at five minutes to midnight in clapped-out Rust Belt New Jersey. Governor Romney’s experience at the state level is not recent, and his record is marred by the Massachusetts health-care plan. He undoubtedly managed the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City well, and was a very capable private-equity executive.

But running the Olympics, a two-week event requiring much preparation and involving thousands of people, is not comparable to turning a long-misgoverned state of 8 million back from the cliff edge toward which it was resolutely hastening. And private equity is basically asset-stripping effected in synchronization with the economic cycle, a skill, certainly, but a far remove from public administration.

Governor Perry has disquieted many with his rhetoric. He inherited the governor’s chair when George W. Bush moved to Washington, and the country is uneasy about swaggering Texans — about talk of “treason” at the Federal Reserve, and of Social Security as a disposable “Ponzi scheme,” and pride at carrying a handgun while jogging. In some stylistic ways, America has never really got over LBJ. George H. W. Bush didn’t actually seem very Texan. Bob Strauss and James Baker are distinctly, but not abrasively, Texan; George W. pushed the swagger and the mangled syntax a long way; but Rick Perry is a cultural challenge.

His cowboy Archie Bunker act has worn thin. That is a very different shortcoming from Christie’s Archie Bunker physique and vocabulary, which, as the New York Times generously observed with vicarious concern for the Republicans, disguise surprisingly centrist views on immigration, gun control, and even the environment.

Of the potential contenders, Christie has a uniquely strong record in the overwhelmingly preeminent current policy concern of debt and deficits; and in the other policy concerns, he could easily have attracted independents.

We can safely infer high Democratic concern when members of the party espy an approaching Republican candidate who is not a yokel, a flake, or, in policy terms, a charter member of the Flat Earth Society. They see Mitt Romney as comfortable, and, as they assume, comfortably beatable, with his waffling answers and the legend of Seamus the almost-flying, incontinent, international-car-roof-traveling Romney family dog. The other Republicans who appear plausible but seem to have passed are Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Haley Barbour; all except Rubio have some credibility on the debt-deficit issue from their own executive (or, in Ryan’s case, legislative) experience.

It is all a little like the great anticipation of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s expected announcement of his candidacy for president in 1968, when he instead inexplicably announced he would not run (he would then, too late, change his mind again). But Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were already running for the Republican nomination and Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic one; in that terrible year for America, there was a crowded field of qualified candidates, even after Lyndon Johnson withdrew.

There is plenty of room for disappointment in Christie’s decision, but he hasn’t been walking on water, and not just because of his girth that so fussed the New York Times in its paroxysms of solicitude. His lively address at the Reagan Library, on “earned exceptionalism,” was comparatively original, but did not touch on many of the problems that have rolled back American exceptionalism to a straight matter of scale of national activity and robustness of national attitudes, while almost all the qualitative criteria on which the concept of American exceptionalism has been based have eroded.

Now that Christie has passed, the Republicans shouldn’t keep beseeching the reluctant from beneath their balconies; they should stop overlooking those already running who may be better qualified than has been appreciated. Jon Huntsman, a successful governor (Utah) and ambassador (China) with a business background; Herman Cain, with a serious career in different businesses and an original policy thinker (his 9% personal, corporate, and sales tax is a serious suggestion); and even the slightly ponderous but thoughtful and principled ex-senator Rick Santorum — all of them deserve more scrutiny than they have received.

All of those mentioned who aren’t running, and the balance of those who are, would make the core of a fine administration to deal with what are becoming desperate circumstances. And in there somewhere, especially if Romney or Perry act as if the office is seeking the man, is a president equal to the great challenge that the public, apparently better than the incumbents, sees and hears, festering and bubbling and getting ready to erupt.

This dispatch first appeared in the National Review.