Pawlenty

SUMMARY
Tim Pawlenty is trying to portray himself as a tough-talking right-wing truth-teller, but actually he has a lengthy career as a hypocritical sometime-moderate flipflopper and liar, and his come-and-go Southern accent is already making the home folks giggle. But the folks in Minnesota are not laughing about what he did as governor. Even with all his accounting tricks, his hidden taxes, his illegal budget cuts, his attacks on union families and their pensions, and his outright theft from school budgets, he still trashed the Minnesota state budget so badly that Moody's lowered their bond rating. Even Fox News shot down his lies about his budgets.

DETAILS

In most respects, Tim Pawlenty should be a slam-dunk with the conservatives. He is anti-abortion and appointed an anti-abortion judge to the bench; he wants the Pledge of Allegiance required in schools; he wants to drill in ANWR; he wants to leave health care up to the market; he wants to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent. He proclaimed in 2001 that children who were at risk and in need were on their own: "Children who are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem for our government." And he advocated amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born here to immigrants, which would disqualify Mitt Romney, among others, from citizenship.

But like Romney, he has problems with flipflopping, and like Romney he is partly a victim of circumstances: his views haven’t changed much, but the party around him has lurched from left to right, thus affording the optical illusion that he himself has moved to the left. He approved cap-and-trade proposals, shooting an ad with Janet Napolitano advocating a federal law on the issue, setting up a task force to launch a cap-and-trade system and making an agreement with other states to implement it, and then was forced to publicly apologize and recant. He changed his stance on nullifying Obama’s health bill; he changed his stance on outreach to women and blacks, and on attack politics, and on gay rights, and on secession, and on too-big-to-fail, and on energy subsidies, and on bailouts, and on the Scozzafava race in New York. He claimed to be tough on sex crimes and then gave a pardon to a convicted sex offender who later raped his own daughter.

He has been particularly embarrassing in condemning the Obama stimulus. He was slamming Obama while his state administration was bragging about the stimulus money they’d gotten for Minnesota. Then Pawlenty slammed the stimulus again, at an event showcasing a firm which the stimulus helped. Which is like slamming Santa while you're opening your toys on Christmas morning.

Now, terrified of the tea party, he is simon-pure, no longer given to statements like this one: “Ronald Reagan was president a long time ago. A lot has happened since then. So the challenge for us is how do you take the principles from the late ’70s and ’80s and apply them to the circumstances and issues and opportunities of our time.”

Another problem: fiscal mismanagement. Pawlenty’s predecessor, a Republican, said “I don’t think any governor has left behind a worse financial mess than he has….Under Tim Pawlenty, it became Deficit Heaven.” The governor pointed out that Pawlenty left Minnesota with a fiscal disaster; he raised property taxes more than $2 billion, raised other taxes which were disguised as "fees", stole from health care funds, stole more than $1 billion from the schools and left them IOU's, and took stimulus money while simultaneously criticizing the program. But because he refused to raise income taxes, he still left the state with a $6 billion deficit, one of the biggest in the nation, and high unemployment. He was slapped down by the state supreme court for illegally cutting budget items, and slapped around again by Moody’s which lowered Minnesota’s bond ratings due to Pawlenty’s fiscal mess. He claimed he left the state with a surplus, but even Fox called it a “faux-surplus.” Meanwhile he fought Democrats in a budget battle that led to a government shutdown. He left office with a 44/50 disapproval differential.

Like a lot of Republicans these days, he has jeopardized his position with Rust-Belt working families with his attitude toward unions. He slashed union pensions and battled public-employee unions in a long transit strike. He claims government unions have launched a “silent coup”, working with corrupt politicians to get more money and benefits at the expense of “working families”, as though cops and firemen and teachers don’t work for a living. And he slammed the auto bailout which saved thousands of union jobs.

There are other challenges for Pawlenty: He is pushing donors hard now because he must prove his fundraising ability, but still he lags behind all the major candidates in raising money. His own staffers say he is a dull speaker; he tries to rock the house like Bachmann with the aggressive speaking and the slogans, launching his formal campaign by calling Obama a coward, but somehow never catches fire. The rightwing blogosphere is completely lukewarm about him.

In both of his gubernatorial races he would have lost if the Democrats hadn’t split their vote between two candidates; in his reelection bid he came within one percent, 22,000 votes, of being thrown out of his job. In July 2009 he trailed Obama by 11 in his own state, and even in November 2009 after the Tea Party explosion he still trailed Obama by nine in Minnesota. Recently a conservative said that the candidates with real credibility on religious issues were Bachmann and Santorum, completely ignoring Pawlenty, who like Bachmann is an evangelical (Santorum is Catholic). So far he is attacking Romney and ignoring Huntsman.

His stylistic gyrations are very shortly going to expose him as an imposter. He is trying to transform himself from moderate to red-meat rightwinger, beating his chest in a rather desperate “I’m a tough-talking man” dance like Bush 41 did, and has called Obama a "doofus". He is trying to convert from flipflopper to “straight talker” like McCain, with his transparent “bash ethanol in Iowa” tactic, for which he was promptly praised by conservatives, although an Iowa reporter said that isn't as much of a big deal as it used to be. He also went to Florida to criticize entitlements. He even tacks on a southern accent when talking to Iowa conservatives, causing laughter back in his home state.

He is also undercutting his truth-talking ethos by launching his race with an astounding number of factual errors, such as his claim that Obama's policies had shifted jobs from the private sector to the public sector, when actually the reverse is the case. He lied about health spending, Social Security solvency, Medicaid, his health programs in Minnesota, the U.S. debt, the NLRB, federal salaries, Obamacare, Obama’s tax policy, his own tax policy, Obama’s stance on unemployment, the bank bailouts, all in a very short period of time.

Even the conservative press panned this effort as the work of a political makeover artist, along the lines of "Let's position you as the guy who tells it like it is!", and even the Club For Growth, one of the key gatekeepers for conservative candidates, admitted that "we struggle to identify the real Pawlenty". By now America is long accustomed to seeing these Republican Barney Fifes trying to slide into the mantle of Reagan, and they know a fake when they see one.

Once the race began in earnest, and people began paying attention, he stumbled badly. He unveiled a wildly unrealistic tax plan which even he admitted was a "stretch" and "aspirational". Then after slamming Romney from afar with the "Obamneycare" line, which in itself sounded a bit silly, he was given a chance to launch the same attack to Romney's face in the New Hampshire debate, and chickened out. He was almost universally judged the loser in the debate.

Even worse, remember that the Republican party base wants to put two people on their national ticket who are willing and indeed eager to try to rip Obama's throat out. Pawlenty proved he didn't have the testicular fortitude to throw a punch at Romney even when he knew the other five politicians on the stage were just waiting to help pound on Romney. Even at the head of a mob of bullies, he proved himself a coward. So not only did he seriously damage his chances for the top spot on the ticket, he is much less likely to get the number-two slot, which is usually reserved for a party attack dog in the Quayle/Cheney/Palin mode. Contrariwise I think Bachmann's odds on both the presidential and vice-presidential slots improved drastically.