As I mentioned in my post yesterday, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty officially dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday after a disappointing third-place finish at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa. For the last few months, Pawlenty had been dogged by one piece of bad campaign news after another: he lost considerable ground in polls, both in Iowa and nationally, his fundraising numbers for the second quarter of the year were far below where they needed to be and he chose not to attack former governor Mitt Romney to his face on national television, contributing to the already widespread perception that he was too weak for the race. Still though, for all his political faults, and they were many, there is nothing in Pawlenty’s political biography that disqualified him from being president. Instead, he was a good candidate who was the victim of bad circumstances.
Let’s rewind to August 2008. Then-Senator Barack Obama had recently wrapped up the Democratic nomination, he had chosen Senator Joe Biden as his running mate and was running two to five points ahead of Senator John McCain in national polls. McCain’s VP search had been going on for several weeks and a list had been narrowed down to four names. One of them (and reportedly McCain’s first choice), Senator Joe Lieberman, was unpalatable to Republicans who were already wary of McCain’s less-than-conservative credentials. Another, Mitt Romney, had attacked McCain too much during the campaign for the two to be comfortable campaigning together. The final two names were the little-known governor of Alaska and Tim Pawlenty, the popular governor of Minnesota and a rising star in the party.
That’s right. Just three short years ago, T-Paw was on the short list to be the second most important standard bearer for the GOP. He rose to fame by being able to govern a Democratic state without sacrificing too many conservative ideals and with his speeches telling the country that Republicans needed to go back to being “the party of Sam’s Club, not the country club.” Many Democratic observers thought that Pawlenty, rather than Romney, presented the biggest challenge to the Obama campaign, as he brought youth to McCain’s ticket and down-to-Earth populism to battle Obama’s soaring rhetoric.
Even as recently as May 2011, when he first got into the race, Pawlenty was hailed by fellow Republicans as the anti-Mitt Romney, the candidate who was truly conservative and, even more importantly, electable on a national scale. In the early days of the campaign, anti-Romney establishment Republicans flocked to Pawlenty’s campaign. And now, he’s just become the first casualty of the 2012 race. What the hell happened?
Pawlenty’s biggest problem was that, as governor of a Democratic state, he failed the Tea Party’s rigid ideological purity test. While governor, he at times came out in favor of a cap and trade energy plan and toyed with the idea of implementing some form of individual mandate for health insurance (as did, it should be noted, Governors Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman). Pawlenty is not a liberal, nor even a moderate: he refused to raise taxes in Minnesota, instead cutting spending drastically. But he did not insist on a complete ideological victory on every issue, something that appears to be a Tea Party requirement this year.
Ideology, though, wasn’t Pawlenty’s only problem. A description that dogged the governor throughout the presidential campaign was “Minnesota nice.” Never was this phrase more bandied about—and ridiculed by the opposition—than when, during the first major presidential debate, Pawlenty was given an opportunity to repeat his criticism of Mitt Romney’s health plan, which he had previously called “Obamneycare.” He didn’t take it.
By the time Pawlenty got mean, it was too late. He sparred with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann over her record last week and has been criticizing everyone from Governor Romney to President Obama in recent weeks, but after his non-confrontational start, angry T-Paw felt inauthentic. Unfortunately, since he couldn’t run on his record in the early, Tea Party-dominated Iowa contests, he had no substance to run on. Without substance, he was forced to rely on force of personality, one trait that the politically-talented former governor does not possess.
Governor Pawlenty was not a bad candidate. In a different time, his soft-spoken style and ability to connect with middle-class voters would have made him, if not the winner of the GOP nomination, then certainly a kingmaker. Unfortunately for him, Pawlenty had terrible timing: everyone has known since 2009 that he was running this year and he probably couldn’t have put it off until 2016 even if he had wanted to—his star was rising, so he tried to take advantage. But when the Tea Party flood swept across America, Pawlenty was left without a constituency. Some people wondered if he would be the Republican Party’s Bill Clinton; instead, he’s not even the GOP’s Howard Dean.
So what comes next for Tim Pawlenty? No one really seems too sure. There have been some rumblings among Minnesota Republicans that he should run in 2012 against Senator Amy Klobuchar, but does anyone really expect Pawlenty to run for Senate in the same election cycle that he tried to run for president? A more likely scenario would be for him to wait until 2014, when this debacle is behind him, and run for Senator Al Franken’s seat, but to me even that seems unlikely—when you run for president, everything else has got to look like small potatoes. Is a VP nod coming for Pawlenty this time around? It appears unlikely, but hey, if you had told me that Joe Biden would be Barack Obama’s running mate back in August of 2007, I probably would have called you some unfriendly names. All that we know for sure is that former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty will not be elected president in 2012.
So long, T-Paw. Thanks for the memories.
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