Voters often play hard to get. Eager candidates court their base. This is the common mating dance of presidential primaries. But sometimes the electorate doesn't like her options. She asks, where have all the good men gone?

Then he's spotted. Or found. He's exactly what she needs. The girlfriends, the media, encourage him. He makes his move. They talk, dance, maybe go on a few dates. But something soon goes awry. She found him hotter from afar. He's not the man she thought he was. Mr. Right goes wrong.

Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels are being wooed. They should also be wary. Flattery is deceptive.

The GOP has given up on finding the perfect man. Time to be pragmatic. Republicans seek the serious sort, a provider, someone who can balance those books, that good (enough) man.

But Daniels and Christie could face the rough side of this siren's song, that rocky shore.

These are substantial prospects. Not her usual type. One is overweight and brusque. The other is short and nearly bald. We say she's ready to overlook the superficial. But there are larger issues. And they're more than skin deep. Both men risk personifying the adage, true in courtship and in politics, that right on paper is not always Mr. Right.

Among GOP Mr. Maybes, conservatives have seemingly fallen hardest for Christie. There he is, jacket off, microphone in hand, in Middletown, N.J. A state worker, in a baseball cap and sweatshirt, asks how he can afford $8,000 more for his new health care costs with an annual salary cap of 2 percent?

"You're not. You're not going to afford it," Christie replies. "You're going to have to make choices among medical plans . . . like everybody else is going to have to make choices in this economy." Christie has conservatives at "you're not." Middletown was a microcosm. Conservatives adore his lucid candor, his budget-cutting brinkmanship.

Radioman Rush Limbaugh: "Is it wrong to love another man?" MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said Christie "reduces me to a 14-year-old girl at a Beatles concert." Commentator Ann Coulter termed him the "magnificent Christie."