MEET TIM PAWLENTY

Chatting with friends recently, we were banding about names for possible GOP candidates for 2012.  Most hoped that the field wouldn't be listed until January of next year, so as not to give the liberal media a heads up to begin bashing the candidates.  Names like Huckabee, Romney, Palin, Daniels, Jindal, Christie, and other notable Republicans were thrown into the mix. 

When I suggested that I like Tim Pawlenty for President I was met with resistance.  "He lacks charisma" some said, "He has no personality" said another.  One person even suggested he get a coach to teach him how to speak animatedly.  I was somewhat perturbed by the tone of the conversation because I have always believed that we voted for the man we felt to be best suited to govern our country and to lead it in the right direction. 

Barack Obama is said to have "charisma."  "Look where voting for charisma has gotten us," I said. "Well how about Marco Rubio, he's eye candy!"  And the chat went on and on.  Granted it was all being said in fun and jokes, but with a bit of seriousness tossed in now and then. Then, it started me thinking what is it that I want in a president? 




Just a regular guy

Later in the evening my brother called and asked me if I'd gotten a Kindle, to which I replied that I wasn't interested in one.  I spend a lot of time looking at an electronic screen as it is, when it comes to reading a book, I like to turn pages.  "That's because, like me, you're Old School!" he said.  I guess he's right and I'm old school about my politics too.  When it comes to choosing a presidential candidate, I want someone wholesome, wise, patriotic, experienced, honest,

conservative, fiscally responsible, intelligent, and the list of qualities goes on.  Most of all I want a president who loves the United States of America, who is proud of his country and doesn't need to apologize for it.

I believe that right now, Tim Pawlenty is the man who better suits that "old school" criteria of mine.  He might not have that "Wow factor," but I do believe he will be a great leader when and IF he decides to run for president. 


Here is an introduction to the real Tim Pawlenty by someone who has had the time to observe him and get to know him.




NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE    
The Quiet Contender
by Robert Costa

Governor Tim Pawlenty

Tim Pawlenty isn’t in the spotlight, yet. But he could charm voters in 2012.


As others kept their distance, Tim Pawlenty took a knee.


It was late, and most undergraduates had long since left the auditorium at George Washington University, but a lone young man in a wheelchair remained. He waited patiently near the door, his shoulders twitching. Flocks of coeds fluttered by. Minutes passed. Then, as Pawlenty finished his last handshake with a clean-cut College Republican, he noticed the fellow at the exit and approached him.


The student struggled to ask a question. Pawlenty, an athletic 50 year-old, dropped to his side. Behind him were empty pizza boxes and trash cans; his aides were watching the clock. But the former Minnesota governor’s eyes stayed fixed upon the face of the young man, who haltingly asked him about the tragedy in Tucson.


“Our hearts and prayers go out to the people who had loved ones who were lost or injured,” Pawlenty replied softly. “We are still heartbroken over that.” Their conversation continued for a couple of minutes, touching on the personal and the political. Pawlenty remained perched on the carpet, his tie and jacket rumpled.


For Pawlenty, it was a quiet moment — one of many I witnessed as I followed him around Washington last week. Out of office after serving two terms in Saint Paul, he has been making the rounds this month, talking up Courage to Stand, his new memoir, and winking at a potential 2012 presidential bid.


Pawlenty’s promotional tour, of course, has coincided with days of half-staff flags — a publicist’s nightmare. Copies of the tome aren’t exactly flying off the shelves. Yet the timing has strangely been a boon for Pawlenty. His low-key Midwestern persona — often scorned by Beltway politicos as flat and tepid — has garnered attention, even accolades, for being just that.

Gov. Pawlenty and Jon Stewart

The day before his Foggy Bottom stop, Pawlenty appeared on Comedy Central’s Daily Show, where he calmly sparred with comedian Jon Stewart for 20 minutes. At the top of the program, Stewart challenged Pawlenty about GOP rhetoric, asking whether leading Republicans “believe we are as close to tyranny and socialism as the tone of their rhetoric would signal.”

Pawlenty did not take the bait. Rather than paint himself as a Tea Party spokesman, or as a chin-pulling critic of the movement, he noted that behind such heavy words lay real political differences, not just ammunition for partisan battle. He pushed back on Stewart’s premise, turning the interview away from a discourse on discourse toward a back-and-forth on policy.

Addressing CPAC

“I think there are a lot of us in the conservative movement who view government — whether it is personalized to Barack Obama or anyone else — as government that crowds into more space that used to be for individuals, that used to be for private markets, that used to be for charity, that used to be for entrepreneurial activity, that used to be for faith organizations,” Pawlenty said. “There are a lot of us who say, ‘you know, that feels like government stepping on us, pushing us to the side.’ There is a continuum between liberty and tyranny, and sometimes it happens very incrementally.”


For the next few minutes, Stewart kept digging for newsy red meat, but Pawlenty never dished it. By mid-interview, the comic recognized that across from him sat a debate partner, a Republican willing to wrangle on tax rates, the size of government, and the federal deficit — not a polarizing bomb-thrower. So he kept Pawlenty on-set for an extended confab, far beyond what he could air.

As the chat closed, Stewart leaned across the table. “You know what’s crazy? I don’t think you and I disagree that much.#…#Do we?” he asked. To which Pawlenty deadpanned, “Yeah.” Both chuckled.

At GW, Pawlenty recounted the exchange. “We had a great discussion. It uncharacteristically went serious — away from the normal comedy routine,” he recalled, as students munched on greasy slices. “I respect [Stewart], he’s smart — he does his homework.”

The audience, mostly collegiate conservatives, nodded and perked up. They may not have known much about Pawlenty, but this early impression was, if anything, different: soft-spoken, earnest, and extemporaneous — the opposite of a glad-handing salesman.

Tim Pawlenty and daughter Anna

By approaching political action with strong principles and an open hand, Pawlenty predicted that the GOP could make major gains in coming years. “Our party needs to understand that we need to connect with people who have not yet joined our team,” he said. “That does not mean that we run around and pretend we are Democrats or liberals.” Instead, he said, the GOP’s future success rests in making a “hopeful and optimistic” case, with a “can-do and constructive spirit.”

With progressives still roosting in Washington, holding onto the Senate and White House, Republicans, Pawlenty argued, need to do more than criticize — they have to be strategic and civil. “I got a lot of experience doing that in Minnesota,” he mused. “It’s a pretty liberal place; it’s a place where Al Franken is a U.S. senator. I mean, think about that.” Still, creating villains out of political opponents, he cautioned, will keep Republican ranks thin.

Pawlenty turned to a theme that has propelled his political career — that the GOP should be the party of Sam’s Club, not the country club. “We don’t want to go to people who are hurting or in doubt, maybe challenged in ways that we don’t directly understand, to condemn and to judge and to scare them,” he said. “We’ve got to identify the problem, but we’ve also got to identify the solution — to say there is a way forward, there is a way out, there is a better way.”

Pawlenty’s recommendation got polite applause. Some, of course, resisted his neighborly charm. At the Q-and-A following the speech, one cheeky student flicked at the governor’s at-ease, Minnesota-nice politics. “Some pundits don’t think that you could be president, and see you more as a vice president,” he said. “Would you be the vice-presidential nominee for the GOP?”

It was a direct citation of the central rap on Pawlenty — that he’s too milquetoast to lead a ticket. The College Republican organizer looked horrified. Yet the governor grinned and ate it up. “If I decided to run, it would be for president, not for vice president.” At that, the students gave him the biggest cheer of the night — one worthy of a contender.

Winning over skeptics will be the crucial challenge for Pawlenty as he eyes a presidential run. Unlike many of his potential rivals, Pawlenty has little baggage. Some could quibble with certain gubernatorial decisions — such as the time he raised cigarette fees to reach a budget deal — but his overall governing record is strong: He resolved a $4.5 billion deficit in his first term, instituted performance pay for public-school teachers, cut billions from public-employee pensions, and issued 299 vetoes. For his efforts, the libertarian Cato Institute gave him an “A” rating on its biennial fiscal report card.

In recent weeks, Pawlenty has brandished his reputation as a fiscal hawk and social conservative. On Sunday he called on Republicans to not raise the federal-debt ceiling, which now stands at $14.3 trillion. “You’ve got to draw some lines in the sand,” he said on Fox News Sunday. And on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the just-repealed military policy on homosexuality, Pawlenty said last week that he would fight to reinstate the policy should he become president.

Beyond his record, Pawlenty’s hardscrabble upbringing is what resonates most. Pawlenty grew up near the stockyards of South Saint Paul. Hockey, and all of its bruising glory, was his passion. His father worked in trucking. Then, at age 16, his mother was taken by cancer. Before she passed, she pushed him to be the first in the family to attend college.

After working his way through college and law school at the University of Minnesota, Pawlenty ran for the state legislature, where he soon rose to become majority leader. He was elected governor in 2002 and reelected in 2006, a tough year for Republicans, especially those in blue states. In 2008, John McCain put Pawlenty on his veep shortlist, giving him a brief flicker in the national spotlight.

But he has not managed to catch fire since. In the early states, Pawlenty has languished in the single digits: One Public Policy Polling survey shows him at 4 percent among Iowa Republicans; a Magellan poll has him at 4 percent in New Hampshire. Gallup also shows that he is hardly a known figure to most Republicans nationwide.

Vin Weber, a former GOP congressman and Pawlenty’s senior adviser, tells me that the early enthusiasm gap can be overcome. Pawlenty, he says, offers something different than the rest — Upper Midwestern values, eight years as a successful, conservative state executive, and a background that resonates with voters who are frustrated with Washington.

“I’ve known Tim Pawlenty since he was in college; I know his family — they’re blue-collar people,” Weber says. “What he is saying is that the Republican party had those voters when Ronald Reagan was president, and when George W. Bush was president, early on, only to lose them. Now we’ve got to get them back in 2012 and he’s the guy to do it. If Republicans can’t explain why conservative policies are right for average, working-class people, then we’ll be consigned to being a permanent minority.”

Governor and Mrs. Pawlenty

For now, as he trudges across the country peddling his book, Pawlenty is keeping his ambitions on low simmer. Retail politics at the local Barnes & Noble, not Iowa, is on the agenda. But as he showed at GW and elsewhere, he’s more than a Minnesota stiff — he has heart, know-how, and a fresh outlook on his party’s future. Voters, like that young man at the door, may not know much about the even-tempered guv, but they’re curious. In what is shaping up to be a raucous and bloody-fisted field, the mild have room to rise.

— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

SUNDAY REFLECTIONS

As the newly elected Senators and Representatives prepare to be seated and sworn in, everyone is speculating on what the mixture of a GOP dominated House, a Democrat Senate and President. will do for the country.  How will it affect the economic crisis?  For weeks now commentators and pundits have been making predictions.  The GOP has announced that the first order of business will be to repeal Obamacare.  Some liberals take offense to the term Obamacare and try to push through the more palatable "health care reform" terminology.  Conservatives warn the Congress not to "roll over" for Obama.  Democrats admonish that Obama won't go begging to the GOP.  In the meantime the president enjoys his  $1.5 million Hawaiian Christmas while signing bill and making objectionable appointments without consulting the Senate as is his wont. 

Others such as Rep. Issa indicate that they are going after the corruption in the Obama Administration.  The new Speaker of the House to be, John Boehmer plans an Obamacare repeal vote before the State of the Union address.  All of us know that the GOP House must still contend with a Democrat held Senate and Obama's veto power.  It's going to be an interesting beginning to the new year.

As we scoured the news reports for facts, and researched for information to write our blog, we did so with the idea of what advice we'd give the GOP.  Sister Two has a new Republican Senator in Mark Kirk.  Sister One unfortunately lives in a Democratic stronghold, but within the Corpus Christi metropolitan area, and they made history on November 2, and defeated Representative Solomon Ortiz and replaced him with Republican Blake Farenholdt.  We are anxious to see what the GOP will do.  Can they succeed?

Armed with several ideas, and even more false starts,  we came across Sunday Reflections in the Washington Examiner, and by golly, here was Professor Reynolds, eloquently expressing what we would have said, except he said it much better.  So with gratitude to him and the Washington Examiner, we bring you an article  that we hope all the GOP in Congress will read.   
Sunday Reflections
Modest proposals to help the new Congress survive and America to thrive


By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
OpEd Contributor
Washington Examiner


With the new Congress being sworn in this week, everyone is full of advice. 


Well, I'm no exception.


The first advice comes from Han Solo in the debut "Star Wars" film: "Don't get cocky." Republicans won big in the last election, but, if they think that constitutes an excuse to slip back into their old ways, circa 2004 to 2006, then they are doomed -- not just as individual politicians, but quite possibly as a party. The public's patience is quite limited, and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future.


Second, remember that fortune favors the bold. It's true that ordinarily in politics, most progress occurs at the margins. But it's also true that these are not ordinary times. Big money-saving and government-shrinking proposals in the House, even if they're shot down by the Democrat-controlled Senate, will nonetheless establish a tone.

 They're trying to hide it, but the Inside-the-Beltway permanent-government political class is currently scared. Keep them that way, while showing the public at large that you're serious.


Third, look beyond Congress. There's a simmering mood in favor of constitutional reform across the country. Proposals such as Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett's "Repeal Amendment" -- in which overweening federal laws can be repealed by a supermajority of state legislatures -- are already floating around and generating sufficient support to require pushback from the New York Times.


Nineties-era ideas like the Balanced Budget Amendment and federal term limits for Congress are also popular again. And there's even interest in calling a federal Constitutional Convention. No doubt other ideas will appear. Give them a fair hearing in Congress. Not only is this worth doing on its own, but it will help keep the Washington-insider crowd off-balance.


Fourth, ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.


Fifth, go after the infrastructure of the government-backed Left. Back in 2002, I wrote that Republicans should be repealing the awful Digital Millennium Copyright Act: By doing so, they'd not only build up goodwill among college-age downloaders and libertarian tech-types, but they'd also harm the entertainment-industrial complex that is a huge source of money and media power for Democrats.


Seldom are politicians presented with the opportunity to do something simultaneously so inherently right, politically popular and strategically advantageous. Naturally, the congressional Republicans of that era blew it.


They just couldn't bring themselves to go after Big Business, even if it was hostile Big Business. That opportunity is still there. And don't pass up similar opportunities, either. There are a lot of them out there.


Sixth -- and this may be the hardest of all -- lead by example. Democrats have been hurt by, for instance, campaigning against Americans' big carbon footprints while living in enormous mansions and flying in private jets. Don't follow in their footsteps.


Saying no to the perks of office is hard, but Americans, who might tolerate hypocrisy when things are going well, are pretty sick of it now. Act like public servants, not members of an entitled aristocracy, no matter how great the temptations are to act otherwise. And they are great indeed.


Finally, and most importantly, don't forget that these are serious times. In the 1990s, America was able to fool itself into believing that we had reached the end of history, that the tough decisions were mostly behind us, and that progress and prosperity were mostly inevitable.


We know better now. The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, the federal government is at a low point in terms of popular legitimacy, and not just Congress, but the entire political class, is on probation.


"Don't blow it" is fairly unspecific advice, but it's important here. Don't be distracted by the many, many things that seem important in Washington but that don't really matter.


This last advice is probably the most important. We live in perilous times, and they demand a self-discipline and seriousness of purpose that has been missing from those who have governed us in recent years.


Rise to the occasion on the big things, and the little ones will take care of themselves. Drop the ball on the big things, and it won't matter how tactically clever your political position is.


So, yeah, don't blow it.

Examiner Sunday Reflections contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is founder and editor of Instapundit.com, and a University of Tennessee law professor.