A Study in the Power of Self-Reliance

There’s no real disagreement on Tim Pawlenty’s essential skills. By the standards of both friends and foes, the man is an unusually gifted politician. He’s blessed with an intuitive sense for tactics, which is mated to a high boiling point that prevents him from getting locked up in petty battles that dominate news cycles. He also has undeniable personal charm that works across all demographic strata.

Insider’s Insider Sarah Janecek, publisher of the popular Politics in Minnesota online publication, now owned by Dolan Media, has spent more than twenty years in Minnesota politics as a lobbyist and Republican insider. She is a frequent guest on KSTP–TV’s At Issue and TPT’s Almanac. Her personal friendship with Governor Pawlenty extends back to their days as young attorneys in the same Minneapolis law firm.

The most basic explanation for this enviable collection of assets is that Pawlenty earned everything he’s achieved. A native South St. Paul boy, the son of a truck-driver father and a homemaker mother who died of cancer when Pawlenty was sixteen, he is the youngest of five siblings and the only one to have gone to college. When he was in high school, his father lost his job and times were tough for the family. Pawlenty worked typical teenager jobs such as delivering newspapers and paid his own way through college and law school at the University of Minnesota.

He met his wife, Mary, in law school, and the couple moved to Eagan, where they are raising two teen-aged daughters, Anna and Mara. He practiced law in the private sector with the Minneapolis law firm of Rider, Bennett, Egan & Arundel, focusing on school district law. In 1992, he was elected to an open seat in then-reliably Republican, population-exploding Eagan. In 1998, the House Republicans gained the majority and his legislative peers elected him majority leader. In 2002, he was elected governor and reelected in 2006. That’s the broadbrush story.

I had a pretty good view as Pawlenty developed his game. We both got involved in Republican politics in the mid-1980s. Pawlenty was one of the “Durenberger guys.” He was former U.S. Senator Dave Durenberger’s political director in the 1988 campaign; I was one of the “Boschwitz people,” working on former U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz’s 1984 campaign and then for a few years in his Washington office. Our paths converged when Pawlenty became one of my bosses at Rider, Bennett, Egan & Arundel (now defunct). The only time I ever heard him stretch the truth was when he wrote about my good character in a letter of recommendation for admission to the bar in 1989. In 1993, Pawlenty was sworn in to serve his first term in the legislature and I began writing for the newsletter Politics in Minnesota. The following year, I started publishing Politics in Minnesota: The Directory. I’ve watched Tim Pawlenty his entire career.

As publisher of Politics in Minnesota, I’ve interviewed and written the biographies of at least 500 people who have served in the legislature. To better understand how Pawlenty rose from obscurity as a suburban freshman legislator to the governor’s mansion, a few general observations:

Most people enter the legislature with healthy egos. Behind every legislator stand dozens and sometimes hundreds of other people who have volunteered time to stuff envelopes, drop literature, advocate for their candidate one-on-one at the door, and walk in parades carrying signs. Volunteers remind candidates how great they are. Candidates start seeing their names on lawn signs and start thinking they actually are great. Winning the election confirms their greatness.

Not so with Pawlenty. He is one of the few I’ve come across who didn’t swallow the show and stayed humble. In part, because that’s his nature, but also because he’s worked as a political operative and understands that political theater is just that, a production. Winning a legislative contest is not about the candidate being great. The candidate is merely the lead actor who gets his name on the marquee.

Another contributing factor to oversized egos is all the work they’ve usually done to become the candidate. Switch out Eagan on Pawlenty’s resumé to any Minnesota suburb or town and you’ve got the resumé of 80 percent of Minnesota’s legislature: Eagan Planning Commission, Eagan Lions Club, Eagan Chamber of Commerce, Eagan City Council.

My last observation is perhaps the dirtiest collective secret of the legislature, maybe all politicians. They all want their story to be that they were drafted, if not begged, cajoled, or hoodwinked, into running for office. The truth is that most legislators do exactly what Pawlenty did. They plot community involvement to build community credibility to run for office. What’s refreshing is Pawlenty’s honesty about it. No drafting or begging required. He wanted a career in politics, and he built one.

He gave early notice that he wanted something more than an I–35E commute from Eagan to St. Paul. In 1997, he filed papers to form a committee to run for governor in 1998, an audacious move for a thirty-six-year-old serving only his fifth year in the legislature. Particularly when conventional Republican wisdom was that Norm Coleman, who was mayor of St. Paul at the time, had the nomination in the bag.

But Pawlenty was testing the waters. In a conversation that we now both recall, Pawlenty, in the prime of his working years, with a wife and young family, said he had to determine if he had a future in government larger than the legislature or if he did not. If he didn’t think he had a decent shot at moving up to a higher office, he would have gotten out.

In August of 1997, Pawlenty sent a letter to GOP delegates, alternates, and activists telling them he was forming a committee. He structured the bulk of the letter as a “Frequently Asked Questions” section (long before all those FAQs invaded the Internet):

Q: Are you too young?
A: Not at all, both Wendell Anderson and Harold Stassen were elected at a younger age.

Q: Do you have a political base?
A: I do indeed. I am a textbook example of a key demographic group—middle thirties, young children, suburban, concerned with issues that affect families and our communities—issues like taxes, crime, education, transportation and the decline of American culture. This base is absolutely essential to any hope of a statewide Republican victory.

He wrote that years before Karl Rove developed Bush’s winning demographic strategy or the late Tim Russert began talking about political geography as red or blue.

Pawlenty quietly dropped what wasn’t really a serious campaign when Coleman declared his candidacy for governor. The year, 1998—Jesse Ventura, anyone?—proved to be a bad year for career politicians. But it became a great year for Pawlenty. The Republicans ended decades of DFL domination in the legislature and took control of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Pawlenty’s peers elected him House majority leader, their number two guy. From the 1999–2000 edition of PIM: The Directory: “That election was no surprise. Pawlenty is viewed as a hard-working legislator; his years of involvement have given him good political instincts; and during his brief bid for Governor . . . he demonstrated his ability to speak well both from a podium and off the cuff.”