2012 Con­tender Series: Tim Paw­lenty

This issue of the Con­tender series will be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from past install­ments. It will con­cen­trate on impres­sions and reac­tions. I con­fess, I will be unabashedly par­ti­san. I have lived with this man as Gov­er­nor of my state. I want oth­ers in the nation to under­stand what is being pre­sented to them.

The basic facts about Tim Paw­lenty are pretty straightforward.

Tim “T-​​Paw” Pawlenty

Born in 1960 in St. Paul, he played ice hockey on his high school’s junior var­sity squad. He went to law school at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota, and was a vice-​​president at a soft­ware com­pany. He was appointed to the Eagan City Plan­ning Com­mis­sion in 1988, and served a term on the Eagan City Coun­cil. He then served in the Min­nesota State House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives start­ing in 1992. He fixed his sights on the U.S. Sen­ate, but stepped aside when then-​​Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney made it clear Norm Cole­man was the Repub­li­can Party’s pre­ferred can­di­date. Instead, Paw­lenty ran for Gov­er­nor, and was nar­rowly elected with 44.4% of the vote in a closely-​​contested three-​​way race in 2002. He was re-​​elected in 2006 with 46% of the vote in another three-​​way race.

There were rumors that John McCain might select Paw­lenty as a Vice Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in 2008. Here in Min­nesota, there were later unsub­stan­ti­ated rumors that he was bit­ter about being passed over for Sarah Palin.

This past Mon­day, Paw­lenty for­mally announced his deci­sion to form a pres­i­den­tial exploratory com­mit­tee. He made the announce­ment through a video posted to his Face­book page. (By the way, most of the pic­tures of minori­ties in that ad are stock footage from Getty Images.)

This fol­lows hot on the heels of a superhero-​​like video ad for his book, “Courage to Stand: An Amer­i­can Story.” He’s been vis­it­ing most of the states in the nation, being coy about whether he would run for President.

His announce­ment cer­tainly doesn’t sur­prise any of us in Min­nesota. He was mostly absent from the state dur­ing the last two years of his sec­ond term as Gov­er­nor, stop­ping by only to say he would not raise taxes to bal­ance our loom­ing $6.2 bil­lion bud­get deficit. His sug­gested solu­tion was to cut edu­ca­tion, med­ical care, gov­ern­ment employ­ees, money for state parks, and var­i­ous sup­port pro­grams for the state’s most needy citizens.

Min­nesota is not known for con­ser­v­a­tive gov­er­nance. Paw­lenty was ini­tially seen here as a “Min­nesota Republican”—a mod­er­ate, some­one the rest of the Party might well see as a RINO. But he earned his bones by refus­ing to raise income taxes dur­ing his two terms, pre­fer­ring instead to increase var­i­ous user fees, license fees, and, most notably, tobacco taxes—various regres­sive sources of income that hit harder at peo­ple of lower incomes.

In 2010, in an effort to bal­ance the Min­nesota bud­get, he refused to nego­ti­ate with the then-​​Democratic-​​dominated state leg­is­la­ture. Instead, after the bud­get had been passed, he uni­lat­er­ally “unal­loted” pro­grams of which he dis­ap­proved, includ­ing a $5.3 mil­lion spe­cial dietary pro­gram for Minnesota’s poor. Minnesota’s Con­sti­tu­tion does allow the Gov­er­nor to make emer­gency cuts of this sort; but there was no emer­gency here, and Democ­rats took the case to court. The State Supreme Court even­tu­ally ruled against Paw­lenty, and most of his cuts were reinstated.

We in Min­nesota have wit­nessed Pawlenty’s tran­si­tion from a mod­er­ate “Min­nesota Repub­li­can” to a far-​​right-​​pandering Tea Party activist. He expressed sup­port for TARP in 2008, but later (in 2010) retracted that sup­port. He appeared in a com­mer­cial sup­port­ing cap-​​and-​​trade, but later said Cap and Trade would be a “disaster.”

I’ve seen T-​​Paw in per­son, in a fairly inti­mate set­ting when he vis­ited one of my for­mer employ­ers back in 2007. He struck me as per­son­able, but unin­spir­ing, tall, gan­gly, with huge hands, hand­some and pho­to­genic, but a bit clumsy. Not a pow­er­ful speaker, but able to talk in com­plete sentences.

He is likely to stress his oppo­si­tion to taxes, and his new-​​found agree­ment with all things Teaper. His for­mer mod­er­ate image, and for­mer sup­port for such Min­nesota val­ues as envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, may haunt him. But he is likely to por­tray his con­ver­sion as a mat­ter of being a born-​​again ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive. His main neg­a­tive may be that he isn’t very excit­ing; he seems too polite and well-​​mannered, too “Min­nesota nice,” for the cur­rent Repub­li­can envi­ron­ment. He will also inspire a lot of oppo­si­tion from those of us who’ve had to live under his rule as Gov­er­nor. Paw­lenty will have to over­come his outwardly-​​gentle demeanor to play well with the mod­ern Repub­li­can base. He will likely try to stress his abil­ity to be elected in a blue state, but that may not impress Repub­li­can diehards who might sus­pect he got votes by being too soft.

Can he win the nom­i­na­tion? On Jan­u­ary 22, the New Hamp­shire Straw Poll put him in a weak third place, with 8%, behind Romney’s 35% and Ron Paul’s 11%, though he beat Palin, Bach­mann, San­to­rum, and Gingrich.

And if he could get the nom­i­na­tion, could he win the gen­eral elec­tion? In late Feb­ru­ary, an NBC News/​Wall Street Jour­nal poll showed Paw­lenty los­ing to Obama 50% to 31%. It’s pos­si­ble, how­ever, that it’s all about the lack of noto­ri­ety; 61% of those polled didn’t even know who he was. (At the recent Grid­iron Din­ner, Pres­i­dent Obama joked of Paw­lenty, “I think the Amer­i­can peo­ple are going to have some tough ques­tions for Tim. Specif­i­cally, ‘Who are you and where do you come from?’ Which is OK. Two years into my pres­i­dency and I’m still get­ting those ques­tions.”) Nonethe­less, given the nar­row national sup­port for Tea Party can­di­dates, Pawlenty’s attempts at Tea Cred are not likely to improve his chances from this poll’s numbers.

In short, he looks like a long shot for the nom­i­na­tion, and an even longer shot for the White House.

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