Is Gov. Chris Christie Pulling a Sarah Palin?

Will New Jersey Governor Chris Christie end up running for president? Does it matter?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been emphatically denying that he’ll run for president next year—all while giving suspiciously high profile “presidential” looking speeches at podiums flanked by American flags. Now, all of a sudden Christie’s camp says he’s “days away” from making a decision, and that the decision all comes down to family—”it’s between Christie and his wife,” notes Politico.

Sound familiar? With a few slight tweaks to the narrative, it sounds an awful lot like the strategy Sarah Palin is pursuing: Let the clock run down on the primaries while making yourself just out of reach, and polish your goodie-goodie image in voters’ minds by suggesting the decision has everything to do with “family” rather than blood-thirsty ambition.

Both Christie and Palin are deftly playing something even more fundamental than politics—they’re playing into the psychological trick that makes people always want what they can’t have. Especially with an otherwise lackluster field of Republican primary candidates, Palin and Christie seem to keenly understand that the candidate voters want most may be precisely the one they can’t have.

This phenomenon isn’t necessarily represented in support polls—one of them recently showed Sarah Palin collecting just 7% support among Republican candidates. But remember, she’s not even a candidate.

How much would that number change if she announced herself as a contender and started spending money on aggrandizing ads? Plus, the desire for what you can’t have is definitely represented in terms of interest in the press. The amount of press Chris Christie and Sarah Palin have generated by simply flirting with a run instead of announcing dwarfs that generated by John Huntsman and Herman Cain—candidates who have been in the race for months.

Plus there’s an upside to all this attention: if Palin and Christie both decide not to run (more likely in Christie’s case, I believe) they’ll still come out of this flirtation phase having rubbed up against the presidency and turned it down. They won’t leave defeated—they’ll move on to the next phase of their careers smelling vaguely presidential and traveling firmly on high ground.

For Christie, should he decline to run for president, Politico writes of his New Jersey gubernatorial race, “the reality is that unless Cory Booker challenges him, there is right now no truly formidable opponent on the horizon for 2013.”

Plus, he’ll be remembered as a guy who could have run for president and been taken seriously—but decided it wasn’t best for his “family.” That’s the kind of candidate voters want.

As for Sarah Palin, cultivating an elusive quality could serve her well, too, after a summer of making herself all too available to basic US history gaffes along her summer bus tour. If she ends up going back to her Fox News commentator position full-time, she’ll do so with a modicum of new-found authority among the far right as being the charismatic antidote to the lackluster Republican field who remained just out of reach because it was, again, best for her family.

For both Christie and Palin, whether they enter the race is almost beside the point—the flirtation we’re seeing now from both of them is the main event.