A Personable Empty Suit, by Careful, Conscious Design

It would be the first time that Abeler, a Republican state representative from Anoka, had talked to Tim Pawlenty since the legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a $6.6 billion transportation bill that included the first gas tax increase in twenty years. Abeler had played a crucial role: He was one of six maverick Republicans who bucked the party and voted with the Democrats to slap the veto aside. Word was T–Paw was ticked.

The Republican governor had exploded after the vote, condemning the bill as “ridiculous,” charging that it had been loaded with “baskets” and “buckets” of new taxes, and threatening voter retaliation in the fall. It was an unusually nasty outburst from Pawlenty, especially considering that the bill had the support of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, arguably the bedrock of the Republican establishment.

Abeler steeled himself for a blistering. “I was so nervous I decided to just start with ‘Hello,’ ” says Abeler, who was punished for his vote by being denied Republican party endorsement in his bid for a sixth term. “But when we met, he didn’t even mention the override. He talked about his mullet.”

Pawlenty had been lampooned in the morning newspaper about his cringe-inducing hair, a look that shrieked, “I still love Michael Bolton.” (Pawlenty finally ditched the mullet in July. The trim job was taken as one more indication he wanted to be John McCain’s running mate, some kind of four-decades-late Republican version of the “Get clean for Gene” thing.)

“He was just joking about the hair,” Abeler says. “That’s when I realized the override was not really a big issue. The passion just wasn’t there.”

Others also have doubted the sincerity of Pawlenty’s outrage. When the governor met with Minnesota House Republicans before the override vote, he didn’t give the rousing “win one for T–Paw” talk they expected. Instead, he told them that if they were going to override, he hoped they would do it fast.

Maybe the biggest political confrontation of the year was not as predictable as it had seemed. Pawlenty was out of town at the time of the vote. He didn’t stay home or go to the barricades. One theory—which fits a textbook Pawlenty tactic—is that he may have actually wanted an override. That way the state’s seriously underfunded transportation system could start moving—without him being held personally accountable. Maybe, the theory goes, he “lost” the battle but won the war: He had vetoed the first transportation package that followed the August 1, 2007, bridge collapse in Minneapolis, as he had vetoed most other transportation bills. But this one had passed, over his veto. Now he could put the bridge in his rearview mirror while still playing to his antitax base—“The legislature did it!”—and turn his attention to bigger stuff: primping for veep.

“A lot of people believe it,” says Abeler.

By the time you read this, Tim Pawlenty may have been picked by John McCain as his running mate at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Or he may have been passed over in the hunt for a young(er) or richer second lieutenant who can help McCain, long in the tooth and short on cash, win in November.

Despite the newspaper columns I have written criticizing Tim Pawlenty’s policies, I like the man. Most people do. I’ve run into him walking on the sidewalk, bumped into him with my kids in a bakery, chatted with him in a barbershop, and seen him at work in the Capitol, at press conferences, and in campaign mode. He is friendly and decent (except on a hockey rink, where I also have run into him and where he is a shameless puck hog) and one of the nicest governors I’ve known.

But, like many Minnesotans, there’s something I don’t understand. What qualified Tim Pawlenty to get on a short list for vice president?

He is young (he’ll be forty-eight in November), often said to be handsome (he wouldn’t have gotten far with the girls I knew on West Seventh Street), charming (after twelve years of Jesse Ventura and Arne Carlson, we have a low charm bar), and articulate (I’m giving him that).

Tim Pawlenty is without question the smoothest pol to be governor in decades. That said, how do you account for the fact he has accomplished so little with those unusual skills and, after almost six years in office, has built no visible legacy?

Who the heck is he, really?

It’s not just me who asks. Many of the state’s most astute political observers wonder too. And some of Pawlenty’s harshest critics are Republicans, including many in the endangered rump group of moderate Republicans who have been disappointed to see Tim Pawlenty transform himself into a hard-line conservative, apparently to feed his ambitions.

“Pawlenty is one of the new breed of politicians who appeal to voters at the very superficial level and have learned how to master the media,” says David Jennings, a former Republican player who was Minnesota House speaker during the mid-1980s and is now superintendent of the Chaska–Chanhassen–Carver public schools. “He understands that people have a short attention span, and he personifies what I see at the national level. Washington hasn’t solved a problem in thirty years. He’d be perfect. Nobody knows what part of him is real and what part is just someone else’s agenda.”

T–Paw (the nickname was coined by his staff) does not much resemble the gushing media reports he gathered during the spring and summer as his name circulated in the VP beauty pageant. Constantly talking about how the GOP needs to appeal to “Sam’s Club Republicans” (he did not invent that nifty phrase, but has been widely credited with it) and emphasizing his working-class roots as a son of a truck-driving South St. Paulite, Pawlenty was trumpeted by The New Republic, no less, as a fresh face with “proletarian chic.”

But Pawlenty is a Prole who wines and dines with the powerful and caters to their political desires first and foremost. A blue-collar kid who has pushed a far-right view of government as a keeper of religious morals, balanced budgets on the backs of the poor (steadfastly opposing tax hikes for the wealthiest taxpayers who pay significantly lower rates than the middle class), and happily played a smiling point man for a host of Bush administration policies cooked up by Karl Rove and Company, from No Child Left Behind to “no new taxes” to the bloody mess in Iraq.

Some working-class hero.