"For adults, look to the statehouses," where Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels are pioneering new styles as governors

For adults, look to the statehouses. Look in particular to New Jersey and Indiana, where Govs. Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels are forging a limited-government Republicanism that connects with people and solves problems. They are models of how to take inchoate dissatisfaction with the status quo, launder it through political talent, and apply it in a practical way to governance.

Christie has just concluded a six-month whirlwind through Trenton that should be studied by political scientists for years to come. In tackling a fiscal crisis in a state groaning under an $11 billion deficit, he did his fellow New Jerseyans the favor of being as forthright as a punch in the mouth. And it worked.

Christie traveled the state making the case for budgetary retrenchment, and he frontally took on the state's most powerful interest, the teachers' union. He rallied the public and split the Democrats, in a bravura performance in the lost art of persuasion. At the national level, George W. Bush thought repeating the same stalwart lines over and over again counted as making an argument, and Barack Obama has simply muscled through his agenda on inflated Democratic majorities. Christie actually connected.

He matched unyielding principle (determined to balance the budget without raising taxes, he vetoed a millionaires' tax within minutes of its passage) with a willingness to take half a loaf (he wanted a constitutional amendment to limit property taxes to 2.5 percent, but settled with Democrats for an imperfect statutory limit). He'll need an Act II to get deeper, institutional reforms, but New Jersey is now separating itself from those other notorious wastrels, California and Illinois.

When it comes to demeanor, Mitch Daniels is to Chris Christie what Miss Indiana is to Snooki. In his quieter way - and in less dire circumstances - the skinflint second-term governor has slimmed down and improved his state's public sector. He inherited a $200 million deficit in 2004, which he turned into a $1.3 billion surplus - just in time for it to act as a cushion during the recession. He has reformed government services and rallied his administration around one simple, common-sense goal: "We will do everything we can to raise the net disposable income of individual Hoosiers."

Both Christie and Daniels are happy (or, in the case of the latter, pleasant) warriors. They both are distinctive politicians, not what a political consultant would cook up in his laboratory (Christie has too much girth and Daniels too little hair). They both feel the weight of responsibility as the chief executives of their states in a way that hyperbolic congressmen and commentators don't. They prove that Republicans can govern, that budgets can be tamed, and that politics can work, so long as serious men and women put their shoulders to the wheel.

In short, they are adults. Their like can't gain control of Washington soon enough.