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.”

Pawlenty framed issues in a way that resonated with the public, and his onstage demeanor came as a blessed antidote to the contentiousness and brusqueness of Ventura.

“[He] can take a complicated issue and turn it into a message of the day. That’s hard to do,” says Chas Anderson, deputy commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Education, who first met Pawlenty when she was a young staffer in the House. Anderson is sharp (anyone who served as a committee administrator for former legendary Rochester Republican representative Dave Bishop when he chaired the powerful Ways and Means Committee had to be sharp). She was Pawlenty’s sole campaign staffer for three months in the 2002 campaign and became a key adviser in both the 2002 and 2006 campaigns.

Anderson rightly observes that Pawlenty acquired his “message of the day” skills as House majority leader because that’s who orchestrates the floor debate on every issue. Anderson credits Ventura for honing Pawlenty’s tactical skills. “When Jesse wasn’t bashing the media, he was bashing the legislature,” she says, and as House majority leader, Pawlenty had to negotiate with Ventura on behalf of the caucus.

“Pawlenty never let Ventura rile him, and figuring out how to respond to Jesse was sometimes very difficult.” No kidding. Ventura, by the way, refused to be interviewed for this story. (A story not about him, surprised?)

Finally, because Pawlenty had a top legislative job at a time when the Republicans actually had a say on what became law, he had a major hand in crafting the kinds of laws Republicans loved, slowing the rate of government spending while at the same time increasing funding for education and transportation. (Those days, when, in the words of then-finance commissioner Pam Wheelock, the state had “boatloads” of money, seem very long ago.)

In 2002, ambitious Republicans had two statewide opportunities: running against Ventura (who everyone assumed was going to seek a second term) or challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone. Pawlenty chose Wellstone, in part, because his state legislative work made him a more obvious fit for the Senate. The problem was that Norm Coleman also chose Wellstone.

Pawlenty began organizing a U.S. Senate campaign in the spring of 2001. The beginnings of that organization were to culminate in a formal announcement at a press conference, a staple of the modern campaign era where the rules are that the media gives you positive, solid coverage. Pawlenty had Room 500 North of the State Office Building packed when he got to the podium (I was there) and delivered what Dane Smith, then senior Star Tribune political reporter and now Growth & Justice think tank president, remembers as “startling and stunning news.” Pawlenty told the crowd that about an hour earlier he had received a call from vice president Dick Cheney, asking him not to run for the Senate.

Pawlenty was shell-shocked. It was the only occasion I recall that he rambled at a podium. He said that ever since he had worked for Durenberger, running for Senate had been his life’s dream, but that if the vice president—conveying the sentiment of President George Bush—thought that Coleman was more likely to beat Wellstone than he was, well, then, for the good of the party, he wouldn’t run.

Much has been made of the Cheney call, in the blogosphere and in print. The New Republic (not a conservative-friendly publication to begin with) got it flat out wrong, saying “the call, according to people close to the situation, was engineered by Pawlenty himself—and that there were no plans for an announcement.”

Talking with Pawlenty over coffee prior to his weekly radio show in mid–July, I asked him to set the record straight. He said he received several calls from lower-level people in the White House in the days prior to his announcement, asking him not to run because the President wanted Coleman. He doesn’t recall the substance of those conversations. But he wasn’t buying the idea that the President was messing with a measly U.S. Senate race (my words, not Pawlenty’s). Apparently, the lower echelon realized he wasn’t buying it either, so the night before the scheduled announcement Pawlenty got a call from Karl Rove.

He vividly remembers this call because he was in Anoka County, conducting a town meeting on education with Representative Jim Abeler (R–Coon Rapids). Even more vividly, Pawlenty recalls what he said when Rove told him the White House preferred Coleman. “I remember exactly what I told Rove,” Pawlenty says, “because I knew it sounded smart-alecky and I knew that [some of my detractors] liked to mention that I had a smart-alecky style.”

He told Rove, “If the President feels that way, have him call me.”

Smart-alecky? Maybe. Smart? Absolutely.

Having worked the political side for Durenberger, Pawlenty recognized that he had no way of knowing whether the President was truly involved or not. It’s common practice for lower-level politicos to assert that the boss wants things a certain way, when, in fact, the boss is in the dark. Pawlenty simply didn’t know whether Coleman and his staff were engineering a candidacy coup or not, until Cheney called.

Pawlenty bit the bullet and got out of the race on the spot.

Over the years, I’ve asked Norm Coleman, along with his various key staffers, about how and who they worked over in the White House to clear the field. Neither Coleman nor his underlings will discuss it.

Today, Pawlenty takes the attitude that the Cheney phone call “worked out well for both of us.” What Pawlenty didn’t say, and doesn’t have to say, is that it worked out best for him. For months Pawlenty has been the subject of glowing national vice presidential selection gossip; Coleman has not.

Shifting gears for a run at the governor’s office meant bucking wealthy businessman Brian Sullivan, who had seemingly preempted the field. Sullivan had money, but his only political experience was writing checks to Republican candidates and causes and serving on the board and as the spokesperson for the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.

While everyone in Republican circles was still talking about the Cheney phone call, Sullivan’s campaign sent out a letter listing who was on the Sullivan for Governor Steering Committee. The top Republican party leaders in each of Minnesota’s eight congressional districts were all on board. Sullivan looked like a shoo-in. That letter was followed by a barrage of others and expensive four-color glossy brochures mailed to delegate, alternate, and party activist lists.

Recall that Pawlenty had an “up or out” view of politics. If he didn’t run for governor in 2002, he wouldn’t be running for any office, including the legislature, ever again. So he started talking to people, who told him what he already knew: Given the choice of having a cup of coffee or a beer with Pawlenty or Sullivan, the vast majority would choose Pawlenty. He had worked his tail off for years to run for statewide office, only to have the party establishment reject him twice, in 1998 and in 2001, both times in favor of Coleman.

Pawlenty declared his candidacy for governor at the Croatian Hall in South St. Paul. Key people helping him make the decision were his wife, Mary, and Ron Eibensteiner, who was then chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota. Pawlenty says Mary told him that she wasn’t interested in spending the rest of her life with a man who regretted not running. Eibensteiner thought Pawlenty ran circles around Sullivan in people skills, which would help him not only woo delegates, but woo general election voters in 2002.

The battle for the endorsement between Pawlenty and Sullivan was a minor epic. Sullivan raised about $680,000 in 2001 and $2.1 million in 2002 (much of it his own money). Pawlenty raised $274,000 in 2001 and about $2.58 million in 2002, none of which was his own. Despite allegations in delegate mailings, Pawlenty and Sullivan were ideologically interchangeable as social and fiscal conservatives. At a time when the prevailing political winds were blowing against career politicians, Pawlenty embraced his career. The Sullivan campaign was fond of noting that it would take an outsider to beat Ventura, who was still in the race, and cited other successful outsiders such as Ventura, Rod Grams, Durenberger, and Boschwitz.

The Republican establishment continued to scorn Pawlenty. The worst hits came from Eibensteiner’s party chair predecessor and former chairman and CEO of TCF Bank Bill Cooper.

A few weeks before the all-important precinct caucuses, Cooper formed a new committee, the Conservative Council. Cooper wrote a letter to party activists, asking, “Are you fed up with Republican candidates trying to pass themselves off as conservatives in order to gain our Party’s endorsement? . . . After numerous elections I got tired of these self-proclaimed conservatives.” The Conservative Council had a goal of exposing “these candidates as the ‘Republicrats’ they truly are, instead of the conservatives they claim to be.” Cooper signed his letter, “Conservatively yours, Bill.”

Eibensteiner responded with his own letter: “In my opinion, Bill erred in initiating this group because it is perceived to be dividing the party, not uniting it . . . The RPM is a ‘big tent’ party.” He also reminded people to observe Ronald Reagan’s “Eleventh Commandment” to speak no ill of fellow Republicans. About 16,000 Republicans voted in the gubernatorial preference poll in March of 2002, and Sullivan beat Pawlenty, 51 percent to 37 percent with 11 percent undecided.

Eibensteiner leaned over a lunch table at Zelo earlier this summer, grinned broadly, and said, “And that’s when we started to have the real fun.”

When the eight congressional conventions were held that spring, delegates got to see Pawlenty and Sullivan in an apples-to-apples comparison, standing at podiums as potential governors giving speeches. “Pawlenty blew them out of the water,” says Eibensteiner.

Sullivan was stiff in front of a microphone and, according to Eibensteiner, even worse one-on-one. Would you rather have a beer with an East Coast patrician? (Sullivan grew up in Maryland and went to Harvard). Or that guy from South St. Paul with the mullet and Golden Gophers sweatshirt? Pawlenty’s asset was the personal interaction he applied in one-on-one meetings with several thousand delegates.

At the state convention, Sullivan led on the first ballot, Pawlenty the other nine. The candidates spoke after the fifth and tenth ballots. Of the last speech, Sullivan is the first to recognize that Pawlenty nailed it. “As I went to that podium,” he says, “I had no idea what to say . . . . Pawlenty, on the other hand, did.” Back to Chas Anderson’s “message of the day” skills, crafted day after day on the Minnesota House floor.

I asked Sullivan today what he thinks are the secrets of Pawlenty’s success. His answer? “He’s a smart, personable guy who impresses those he works with and motivates them to support him.”

Pawlenty won the general election, albeit with a plurality of 44 percent to DFLer and former state senate majority leader Roger Moe’s 36 percent, with Tim Penny, former First District congressman and DFLer, who ran as the Independence Party candidate, getting 16 percent. If Penny had not run, Moe may have won. But when those three were on the same dais, Pawlenty invariably won the “Who would you rather have a beer with?” contest.

Pawlenty detractors are fond of noting that Pawlenty got lucky twice. In 2006, he faced another Democrat-turned-Independent in Peter Hutchinson, along with the very formidable DFL candidate, former attorney general Mike Hatch: Pawlenty, 46.6 percent; Hatch, 45.7 percent; Hutchinson, 6.4 percent. Pawlenty disagrees with that, noting that his internal polling showed him winning starting in mid–October of 2006. “What we learned was that the more people learned about Hatch, the less they liked him,” he says.

Trite but true, close only counts in horseshoes, not politics. Pawlenty won two terms. Only political insiders talk about pluralities. Regular people remember those messages of the day.

In office, the work of actually governing comes easy to Pawlenty, even when faced with a massive, historic budget shortfall of $4.5 billion in his first term. As a legislator, Pawlenty had learned how the complicated business of state government money works, with a zillion different funds allocated to a zillion different places. “At the time,” he says, “I went carefully through every account the state has, many times.” True, as governor, he got cute with raising cigarette distribution fees. But in his legal mind, he stayed true to the “no new taxes” pledge he made as a candidate because the statute specified that money was a fee, not a tax.

I asked Pawlenty how he learned to take complicated issues and make them simple. He said he tries to imagine himself explaining stuff to people at the South St. Paul Croatian Hall. No stretch there.

When I sat down with Pawlenty mid–July, before I told him a word about what anyone else had said about the reasons for his success, I asked him what he thought his “secrets” were. Without batting an eye, he answered, “I’ve been blessed by God. Sure, I’ve worked hard, but God has given me gifts, including connecting with people and reading people.”

“People” also includes the press, a vital component of any politician’s long-term success. With the people scrutinizing you 24/7, it’s easy to become a caricature or a villain. Pawlenty avoided both.

“Any estimate of his assets,” says Dane Smith, “has to start with the fact that Pawlenty sets the standard for how to deal with the news media. He could write the textbook. He is far and away one of the best in the business at this part of the game, and it’s why he was viewed by some Minnesota news media almost from inauguration day as a potential major-leaguer. He tends to be accessible, reasonable, professional, straightforward, seldom hostile or argumentative, but not overly familiar or chummy either.

“He doesn’t complain frequently, and he treats reporters and editors with respect, almost as if they were responsible adults—not all of them actually are—who have a job to do.

“He’s not a cut-up comedian, but he has an intelligent sense of humor that comes through in any conversation with him. I remember him being disarmingly open at times, in personal asides, about minor concerns with his daughters, explaining his musical tastes and stuff. He remembers his last conversation with you and expresses a normal passing interest in your general condition, without pandering or prying.”

One of the only bad raps on Pawlenty, from even his closest advisers, is that when it comes to making political decisions he’s a one-man band. He hasn’t always been that way. Some of these close-in people say Pawlenty’s go-it-alone style dates back to the final crucial event in the 2002 campaign.

The Independence Party filed a complaint with the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board alleging that several pro–Pawlenty television ads were not “independent expenditures” of the state Republican party. Minnesota law allows political parties to spend money to promote a candidate; but the promotion—the TV spot in this case—cannot be created with the express or implied participation of the candidate. But a Pawlenty political consultant had sold video taken for the campaign to another political consultant working for the state party and the party used it in ads. Weeks before the election, the board ruled that the ads were not an independent expenditure because of the use of the original video. Pawlenty could have appealed the ruling, which he should have won because the video exchange was made unbeknown to him or his campaign. Or he could accept the ruling and take a huge hit to his $2.2 million publicly financed campaign.

There was passionate disagreement among his then-closest advisers, including campaign manager Tim Commers and longtime friend and professional associate Elam Bauer, who both argued in favor of fighting it. Those in the other camp were saying, “Accept it and move on. There’s no way to fight it, legally or PR-wise.”

In the end, Pawlenty decided to accept the ruling, and the final determination was a $600,000 loss to the campaign treasury. The clincher was that Pawlenty, while disavowing knowledge of what had transpired, apologized for the mistakes of staff and consultants.

He had let his band play. They screwed up, and he could have lost the election over it. In the aftermath, Pawlenty’s rap became one of not delegating any serious political decision-making. Pawlenty naturally denies this, noting that he tells his commissioners that “they are CEOs of their agencies, only rarely do I micromanage.”

Back to Ron Eibensteiner. He too comes from humble beginnings. He was raised on a farm outside of Sauk Centre, where his brothers still work the land. I’ve met the brothers. They are Lake Wobegon farmers to a T. Garrison Keillor would be pleased to know they are all diehard Democrats . . . most of the time. Eibensteiner likes telling the story about how his brother Joe called him and said he and every Democrat he knew were going to vote for Moe. Ron said, “Wait a minute. Get those DFL farmers in a local bar, and I’ll get Pawlenty to swing by.” Which he did. After sharing a beer with Pawlenty at the local Lake Wobegon–esque bar in Sauk Centre, every one of those Democrats voted for Pawlenty.

Eibensteiner’s theory goes something like this: “The best political leaders are policy smart and politically smart.” However, the really successful ones—and “this applies to people who are successful in politics, business, sports, entertainment, you name it—are the ones who have humility. The higher you go up the ladder, the more people are telling you how great you are.” Remember where you came from. Check.

“Because the more successful you get, the more you need to thank God, because humility requires a belief in God or a higher power, because then you know it’s not about you.” Belief in God, check.

“The other two things are a sense of humor—the ability to not take yourself so seriously—and the ability to connect with people, to communicate so that the average Joe gets it.” Croatian Hall, Lake Wobegon bar, check.

Eibensteiner surprised me then by quoting Rudyard Kipling, right there at Zelo over a bowl of chicken soup. From Kipling’s “If”:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

I surprised Pawlenty when I told him Eibensteiner was loftily quoting Kipling in describing him. After showing him the poem, Pawlenty paused for a long moment and asked if I’d read The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. I told him I had, but not for years. Then he asked me if I remembered the first line of the book, which I did not.

“The first line reads, ‘It’s not about you.’”