The Real Pawlenty Never Campaigned

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The tritest cliché in American English is the injunction to “be yourself.”  Despite this, an entire industry of political consultants devotes itself to teaching candidates how to be anyone other than themselves.   Such is the unhappy fate of Tim Pawlenty.

Born of the working class in South St. Paul, Pawlenty made his first appearance on the national stage as governor of Minnesota by declaring that the GOP must be “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”  Not one or the other, but both.

Over the past generation, the Republican Party has become the party of the blue-collar man in the middle of the country.  Pawlenty once proudly sported a mullet and worked his way through law school in jobs where he was surrounded by the people he grew up with.  After a successful stint in a rather blue state, Pawlenty was perfectly primed to take the place as the working class candidate, standing up for the hard-working, productive sector of the economy that the GOP had prided itself on winning ever since Reagan’s Democrats.

But it was not to be.  From the beginning, Pawlenty billed himself as an acceptable form of Mitt Romney.  He too could raise money and he too could put some traditionally Democratic states in play.  As a bonus his record on social litmus tests was (comparatively) spotless. The pitch became: get the electability of Romney without the baggage!  The problem was, Tim Pawlenty is no Mitt Romney.  The venture capitalists and socially moderate Northeasterners could never see a Tim Pawlenty as one of them.

Then, a bigger problem came onto the horizon:  Michele Bachmann -- another Minnesotan, but one who painted in bold, primary colors, rather than pale pastels.  Now, the Republican Party was faced with a real choice: Romney vs. Bachmann; Competence vs. Conviction.  Pawlenty became an afterthought.

The wheels really came off in Chicago for the good governor.  Pawlenty gave an address titled, “A Better Deal”, which read like an editorial from the Wall Street Journal -- a pitch for yuppies and Greenwich bankers to return to the party of the stock market.  Pawlenty went from safe-Romney to steroid-Romney at blinding speed.  He was left as a man without a message and without a constituency.

The sad part of this story is that Pawlenty seems by all accounts to be a decent, honorable man.  But he took the path well-trodden.  Romney tried to wear the mantle of the true-believer social con in ’08, only to gain fewer delegates than the underfunded man of the (mostly Southern) people, Mike Huckabee.  McCain tried to tack right in the general election last time, and lost the fire of his ’00 campaign.   Likewise, if Bachmann were run to the center in an attempt to gain electability points from the media, surely the only response would be disappointment from her current supporters.

I started with a trite cliché and might as well end with one.  In this era, the voters want authenticity. Due to websites like YouTube, voters believe that at some point they will see who the candidate truly is.  Accurate or not, that perception is powerful.  So remaining candidates: be yourself.  If you lose because of it, wait – your time may come.  Reagan did not win in 1976 and Churchill was a pariah in 1935.  Why are you in such a hurry?