Tim Pawlenty sounds a little hoarse.
Whether the all-but-certain presidential candidate in 2012 is addressing a conference of grassroots activists in Washington, a tea party convention in Arizona, or a gathering of religious conservatives in Iowa, he uses volume to make up for what he lacks in rhetorical gifts. Grasping for a preacher's cadence, his voice rises and falls at the wrong times. He's got no rhythm.
Pawlenty is trying hard--too hard, say his detractors, who mock his slick Internet videos that could pass for summer blockbuster movie trailers, the trace of a Southern accent in his recent remarks in rural Iowa, the flinty inflection in his tirades against the federal government. Minnesotans who criticize his two terms as governor that ended in January say he overstates his fiscal stewardship and glosses over the $5 billion deficit facing his successor, one of the most-serious state shortfalls in the country.
Putting those issues aside for the moment, Pawlenty is a near-perfect Republican candidate on paper. A governor (i.e., Washington outsider!) whose signature issue was holding the line on taxes. An evangelical Christian fluent in Scripture who is married to his law-school sweetheart. An up-by-the-bootstraps success story from the Midwest.
In a wide-open Republican field in which many of his anticipated rivals have higher national profiles, fatter fundraising networks, and more-charismatic personalities, Pawlenty's biggest pitfall could be overdoing it--at the expense of what makes him an appealing candidate in the first place.
"Where he gets hung up is when he wants to overplay what is already a pretty strong conservative hand," said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. "He's in danger of concocting a conservative caricature of himself as he tries to match the stridency of some of the other candidates."
Frequently knocked for his "Minnesota nice" lack of charisma, Pawlenty was downright sarcastic last month when he strode to the podium at the Point of Grace Church in Iowa, the state that looms as his most crucial gateway to the nomination. As the crowd applauded, he said, "Well, thanks a lot. Or as President Obama would say, 'You're welcome.' "
Can Tim Pawlenty be saved from himself?
�
THE CANDIDATE
To the surprise of no one, Pawlenty announced on March 21 that he was launching a presidential exploratory committee. Over the past year, he has made a dozen trips apiece to Iowa and New Hampshire, which traditionally hold the earliest contests. In what has become de rigueur for presidential candidates, Pawlenty went on a nationwide book tour soon after leaving office on January 3 to promote his memoir, Courage to Stand, which laces his life story with his political philosophy.
He's also been locking down key national strategists, including Phil Musser, the former executive director of the Republican Governors Association; Sara Fagen, White House political director under George W. Bush; and Terry Nelson, a top adviser on Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
Pawlenty also tapped Brian Haley, the deputy national finance director for 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, to head his fundraising team. The Minnesotan has picked off a couple of key fundraisers, including Katie McBreen and Ann Herberger, from Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign.
The Facebook video announcing his exploratory committee provides a clear window into Pawlenty's fledgling campaign. The first images are of his hometown of South St. Paul, with Pawlenty noting: "I grew up a few miles from here." It's clear that Minnesota will serve as a key campaign prop for Pawlenty, the way that Hope, Ark., was a touchstone for a Southern governor named Bill Clinton, and Plains, Ga., helped define a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.
In Pawlenty's case, his Midwestern home evokes the values of the heartland. The state is known for clean politics and high civic involvement. It has weathered the recession better than most; its unemployment rate of 6.7 percent is lower than the national average of 8.8 percent, thanks to a diverse economy.
Pawlenty, now 50, was the youngest of five children, growing up in the fading shadows of the once-mighty stockyards and meatpacking plants. His dad drove a truck. His mom died of ovarian cancer when he was 16. Shortly afterward, his father was laid off. After graduating from law school, Pawlenty worked as a labor-law attorney and as a vice president at a software company.
"This guy is truer to his working-class roots than most people can imagine." --Vin Weber
His hardscrabble background--Pawlenty was the first in his family to go to college--gives him the potential to connect with economically struggling voters. "I know that feeling. I lived it," he says in the Facebook video. In a light-blue shirt and khaki parka, he speaks directly into the camera.
Perhaps more than any other potential 2012 candidate besides Sarah Palin, who has used her Alaskan roots to forge an image as a gutsy frontierswoman, Pawlenty is relying on his home state to help introduce himself to voters. What's more, Minnesota is next door to Iowa, allowing him to easily visit and claim kinship with the state holding the first caucus. Pawlenty is frequently credited with introducing a new voting bloc into the political lexicon that includes soccer moms and NASCAR dads. During his 2001 campaign for governor, in a not-so-subtle jab at his Republican primary opponent, Brian Sullivan, a Harvard-trained millionaire businessman, Pawlenty quipped, "We need to be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."
The phrase became his trademark, and other politicians frequently borrow it to describe the working-class, white vote. The logo for Pawlenty's presidential exploratory committee says it all: a slightly weathered, rippled American flag that looks like it belongs on a vintage T-shirt. Pawlenty's blue-collar, made-in-America roots are as authentic as his musical heroes, John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen.
"Some people get all hyped up about whether you are coming from the political left or the right, but the average voter just wants to know, in a very basic sense, who you are and where you come from," said Vin Weber, a former member of Congress from Minnesota who is advising Pawlenty. "If I know you're a working-class guy from Minnesota who goes to church on Sundays and likes to play hockey--those are the things the average person will understand better than your position on entitlement reform. This guy is truer to his working-class roots than most people can imagine."
�
A HARDER EDGE
Yet, for all his supposed authenticity, Pawlenty appeared to put on a phony Southern accent during his speech to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition last month. Minnesota Public Radio did a story on it, lining up his remarks in Iowa with the identical, drawl-free remarks from other events.
"Pawlenty is campaigning as if he's some sort of Southern preacher," Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observed. "At the Iowa event, he was dropping g's all over the place, using 'ain't' instead of 'isn't,' and adding a syrup to his vowels not indigenous to Minnesota.... If they want to beat Obama, Republicans should hope Pawlenty finds his authentic voice."
The flap was largely confined to political insiders, but it should serve as a cautionary tale for Pawlenty. When he's not trying to be folksy, he seems to be adopting a harder-edged, us-versus-them tone, similar to the one Palin has used so effectively to rally the conservative base--and to alienate moderates.
Wagging his finger and raising his voice, Pawlenty sounded like a scold at the Iowa event.
As others try to push out and marginalize people of faith, we need to remember ... that the Constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith!... We have people in Washington, D.C., who believe the unborn do not have the right to life. Yes, they do! We have people in Washington, D.C., who say marriage will be defined however we feel like defining it. No, it won't! It should be defined as between a man and a woman.... The Constitution doesn't say we the judges, or we the media, or we the elites. It says, "We the people." We tell them what to do! They don't tell us what to do!
So much for "Minnesota nice."
The rhetoric represents an unmistakable shift by Pawlenty, who campaigned for governor as a pro-business Republican who wouldn't raise taxes, not as a moral crusader or antigovernment zealot. Asked the day after his election in 2002 how conservative he was, he said, "I wouldn't describe my record as anything but mainstream Republican.... I'm not going to be the Republican governor, but the governor for Minnesota."
Pawlenty has also taken a hard line in recent weeks against public-employee unions in the wake of controversial efforts by Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio to roll back collective-bargaining rights. He frequently boasts of wringing retirement benefits away from new bus drivers after a 44-day strike in 2004.
"This isn't about the coal miners from the 1930s," Pawlenty scoffed after addressing a group of College Republicans at Iowa State University in March. "This is about people who are working in some of the most-protected job categories in the country, that have some of the most-generous benefits and protections of any employees in the country. To suggest they should get a better deal than the people who are paying the bill, the taxpayers, is nonsense, and they finally are getting found out."
�
TIM WHO?
It's easy to understand why Pawlenty is ramping up his rhetoric. He has been overlooked more than once before. The last time he tried to move to Washington, the Bush White House preferred Norm Coleman for the U.S. Senate seat in 2002 and asked Pawlenty to step aside. He did just that, and ran for governor, following in the large footsteps of former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura.
In 2008, Pawlenty came tantalizingly close to becoming McCain's running mate before being passed over for Palin, the more glamorous governor of Alaska. Palin became a megastar; Pawlenty went back to Minnesota.
He apparently decided a makeover was in order. Pawlenty hired Lucas Baiano, a 20-something, hotshot videographer who has become the talk of new-media circles after making a widely viewed Internet video for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008. When Clinton dropped out of the race, Baiano went to work for McCain and later for the Republican Governors Association. The aspiring filmmaker brings the sensibility of a Steven Spielberg epic to politics, relying on a turbocharged pace, jerky camera angles, and iconic American images, all set to orchestral music that builds to a crescendo.
"Nothing about Pawlenty commands attention, so he has to invent those traits in video," said political-science professor Steven Schier of Carleton College. "He's kind of like a Toyota Corolla--reliable, performs well under pressure, but doesn't look like much. He's a nice guy trying to put a little sizzle on the plate."
In a fast-paced, herky-jerky video montage highlighting his appearance at the tea party convention in Arizona, Pawlenty doesn't come across as a middle-aged lawyer and father of two from Eagen, Minn. He sounds like a revolutionary.
We, the people of the United States, will rise up again! We will take back our government! This is our country!
An over-the-top publicity stunt that deserved a snarky send-up by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert? Or a smart bid for media exposure in a click-happy Internet environment? It's a close call.
"I think it's a reflection of the role of new media," Weber said. "I like that it gets your attention."
Indeed, that is one of Pawlenty's biggest challenges. A Gallup Poll taken right before he announced the exploratory committee found that 59 percent of the voters had never heard of him. To put that into perspective, just about every Republican nominee since World War II--Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Nixon (again), Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain--was well-known at this point in the election cycle. Even Obama, considered a Democratic long shot at this point four years ago, was recognized by more than 75 percent of voters, according to Gallup.
Minnesota offers Pawlenty unimpeachable roots in middle America, unlike potential rivals who have multiple residences or spent lots of time in Washington.
Pawlenty's low national profile puts him several steps behind the putative Republican front-runner, Mitt Romney. So does his smaller-scale fundraising operation. Romney's political action committee raised more than $9.1 million during the 2010 election cycle, while Pawlenty collected only about $3.3 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Unlike California and other big states, Minnesota is not home to a rich pool of donors that could help Pawlenty compete with Romney's national fundraising network and personal wealth.
Minnesota does offer Pawlenty unimpeachable roots in middle America, unlike potential rivals who have multiple residences (Romney) or spent significant time in Washington (Haley Barbour and Newt Gingrich). Pawlenty has never lived outside of Minnesota; he and his wife and two daughters have lived in the same three-bedroom house in Eagen since 1994.
His lack of obvious drawbacks has caught the eye of GOP operatives. Last week, National Journal 's Political Insiders Poll put Pawlenty in second place among the potential Republican presidential candidates, behind Romney and ahead of Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Mike Huckabee.
"I like Pawlenty's humility," said Ann Herberger, a leading GOP fundraiser based in Florida who recently signed up with Pawlenty after working for Romney in 2008. "I think he's the right man at the right time for the right job.... This is a guy who puts one foot in front of the other."
�
RUNNING ON HIS RECORD
Pawlenty's record is pretty straightforward. For a politician who has been in public office for more than 20 years, he has been forced to explain remarkably few flip-flops. (He has, among other things, renounced voting to add sexual orientation to the state's human-rights law and supporting a regional cap-and-trade agreement.) Romney spent much of the 2008 campaign running away from his past positions on abortion, immigration, gay rights, and gun control, and he now faces an uphill battle to distinguish his Massachusetts health care program from "Obamacare."
In contrast, Pawlenty is unapologetically running on his Minnesota record. He rarely fails to mention that he was one of four governors who got an "A" from the fiscally conservative Cato Institute in 2010. He also boasts of setting a state record for vetoes, rejecting billions of dollars in tax and spending increases and even forcing a government shutdown.
"The big picture is that Tim Pawlenty was the most conservative governor in modern Minnesota history," said Jacobs of the University of Minnesota. "He was in a continual war with the Democratic-controlled Legislature."
Last year, he went so far as to use a state law that allows the governor to make unilateral, "unallotment" cuts--without the Legislature's approval--in certain fiscal emergencies. The Minnesota Supreme Court said that he overstepped his authority when he whacked $2.7 billion from the budget.
"He brought a significant change in the culture," said Dan McElroy, one of the governor's top advisers. "He didn't do it as a slash-and-burn conservative but as someone who believed we couldn't take it for granted that we could be a high-cost state and continue to be successful. He believed that passionately."
To make the case that he would similarly enforce conservative discipline on Washington, Pawlenty likes to say, "As Frank Sinatra would sing about New York, if we can do it there, we can do it anywhere."
But earlier in his administration, Cato gave him two Bs and a C, rapping him for a $200 million annual increase in cigarette fees and the elimination of a tax break for companies with foreign operations. "There is no way to put lipstick on that tax-increase pig," Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform said of the cigarette fee at the time. Pawlenty has backtracked, although he refuses to characterize the hike as a tax. "Even as a fee, it's something I regret agreeing to," he writes in his memoir.
Pawlenty's never-surrender stance on income and sales taxes increased the pressure on school districts, counties, and municipalities to cover their costs by raising local property taxes. In his last year in office, the governor balanced the books by using $2.3 billion in federal stimulus money and what the Minnesota Taxpayers Association called "budgetary duct tape"--shifting $1.4 billion in school-aid payments; delaying $152 million in sales and corporate income tax refunds; raiding $124 million from state funds meant for other purposes; and resorting to other accounting tricks.
Pawlenty didn't so much remake Minnesota's budget as pull it apart, twist it around, and squeeze it real hard. "The couch cushions are now empty, and with a $5 billion deficit, we are facing rather dramatic decisions about raising taxes or cutting spending," said Mark Haveman, executive director of the Minnesota Taxpayers Association. "He didn't address any of the structural spending issues that are now looming."
To be sure, nearly every state is struggling with budget shortfalls in the wake of the worst recession since the 1930s. But only five states--California, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Texas--are facing gaps bigger than Minnesota's as a share of their overall budgets, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
"I take very strong exception to Governor Pawlenty's analysis of his performance," said former Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican who has been critical of Pawlenty since his second term. "He had this mantra of no taxes, but he massages it with massive shifts of money and fee increases, and then he has the audacity to run around the country saying he balanced the books? What he did is no different than what they're doing in Washington."
The Pawlenty camp emphasizes that the $5 billion deficit is only an estimate, based on a larger-than-expected increase in state spending in the coming year and the inability of his successor and state lawmakers to agree on making the "unallotment" cuts permanent. The biggest culprit in Minnesota, according to Pawlenty supporters: escalating health care costs for the elderly and the poor, which Pawlenty had limited power to streamline without the cooperation of Democratic lawmakers.
In his book, Pawlenty doesn't downplay the impact of a looming deficit. He describes his "pale-faced horror" when he learned shortly after his election in 2002 that the state was forecasting a $4.6 billion deficit. "For a moment it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room," he writes. "I mean, I wasn't even sitting under the Capitol dome yet and here I was faced with what seemed like a nearly insurmountable economic challenge."
Still, that task was perhaps less daunting than the one at hand: to persuade voters across the country to take a long look at a no-name, low-key, quietly competent Midwesterner at a time when the candidate who tweets the loudest often commands the headlines. At the same time, voters value authenticity more than ever. Just as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were imperfect candidates who learned to embrace their personal weaknesses, perhaps Pawlenty can withstand the temptation to overcompensate and can make boring seem cool.�
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий