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.

It is true that he was the first in his family to attend college, but if he suddenly had to do it again, he wouldn’t be able to afford the University of Minnesota law school in Tim Pawlenty’s Brave New World. When he got his law degree in 1986, tuition was about $2,794. Now it’s $20,000 and rising, while state support—now under 10 percent of the law school budget—falls.

To “get” Tim Pawlenty, it helps to understand that he is a performance artist, as Dave Jennings suggests. But he is not playing to the theater where we sit: here in Minnesota. But to a much more prestigious theater, on a much larger stage: Washington.

Here, his record is mostly an unimpressive bag of half-hearted initiatives that got good hype, but invariably went nowhere. Every election year, for instance, he trots out a new state crackdown on illegal immigrants that is 90 percent rhetoric and 10 percent minor moves he could have accomplished without calling a press conference. A recreational runner, Pawlenty must keep his track shoes on all day: He zooms from one photo op to another, like a Minnesota Zelig, all the while presiding over a state whose quality rankings are slipping and whose standards, like its bridges, are increasingly shaky. But that’s not important.

What counts is that he has been a loyal acolyte to Dick Cheney, Rove, and Grover Norquist, the archconservative “tax reform” guru who famously said he wanted to shrink government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.

Despite repeated aw-shucks declarations that he was committed to his “day job,” Pawlenty went after a vice presidential nod like a spinster diving for the flowers at a bridal bouquet toss. Like hers, his time is running out. Brutal budget deficits loom ahead, and there are no reserves or rainy-day funds left to cover them. There will be blood. And there will be limited employment prospects for Pawlenty beyond 2010, when he could run again if he isn’t playing Best Boy to President Gramps. Minnesota has not yet elected anyone to three consecutive four-year terms in the governor’s office. And Pawlenty, who has yet to win a majority of statewide votes, is not a good bet to be the first.

His “day job” may be slipping away. Caddying for John McCain was Plan B.

Former Minnesota Congressman Vin Weber, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidential nomination, has touted Pawlenty as a regular guy who “doesn’t wear [religion] on his sleeve.” But that was before Pawlenty started being called a favorite to win the vice presidential plum. The closer he got to the forbidden fruit, the more he started showing off his evangelical street cred.

There are around 30 million evangelical voters out there and most of them don’t like McCain much. Tim Pawlenty, the argument goes, could help McCain enormously, and after playing it coyly for a few months, Pawlenty dropped his guard when the veepstakes competition heated up and made sure the message of his availability came through loud and clear. In the process, he revealed a more Cheneyesque bent than we usually see.

“I am defined by my commitment to Christ,” Pawlenty told a Christian network in June, during one of a series of interviews in which he used openly religious language of the kind he usually avoids in Minnesota. His religion finally got on his sleeve when he took one for McCain, attempting to assure skeptical Christians that McCain—a divorced and remarried man who has attacked some leaders of the religious right as intolerant—is an ally of their cause. McCain, he said, stands for “winning the war, getting us strict constructionists on the Supreme Court, which is so important not just for now but for the next twenty years . . . His faith system, I think, would be something that would make evangelicals proud.”

During his first campaign for governor, Pawlenty’s church was referred to in media reports as “non-denominational” or “ecumenical.” It is neither. Wooddale is a large evangelical church belonging to the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. Although Mary Pawlenty has openly discussed her prayer life, Tim Pawlenty hasn’t. Few in the public know he belongs to a church that teaches that when “believers have differences they are to submit those differences to the rule of the church, rather than a secular court.” Whoa!

In Blue Minnesota, it’s not Pawlenty’s religious faith that is troubling. It’s his agenda, which he has now linked to his faith: The war in Iraq, the war for the Supreme Court, the whole neo-con agenda. On a national stage, he might actually have impact on those issues. But at home in Minnesota, he hasn’t made much difference.

“If you disagree with Tim Pawlenty on something, you don’t have to worry much,” says Tim Penny, the Independence Party’s candidate for governor in 2002. “He won’t risk anything to push it. The problem is that if you agree with him on something, he won’t push for that either.”

Call it the “Empty Suit by Design Syndrome.” Pawlenty’s critics come from across the political spectrum and don’t agree on much. Except for this: Pawlenty is a consummate poseur. He plays the game amazingly well. But he rarely scores any runs.

It all makes perverse sense when he is viewed as an unquestioning pupil of the Rove–Cheney–Norquist school, where the best government is little to no government and the raison d’être of political life is winning elections, nothing more.

Penny is a devout Lutheran and former DFL congressman who was too conservative on economic and social issues for many DFLers. Like Pawlenty, he’s a strong supporter of John McCain. Today, Penny is president of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, based in Owatonna, which works for economic growth in a twenty-county region. His bottom line on Pawlenty: “nice man, bad governor.”

Penny is puzzled by what he sees as the news media’s swooning for Pawlenty. “He comes out immigrant bashing, regular as clockwork,” Penny says. “But the press doesn’t ask why, if he’s anti-immigrant, isn’t he in Worthington, attacking the employers [of illegal immigrants] or applauding the arrests when Immigration and Customs is rounding them up? Because when things become controversial, Tim Pawlenty is nowhere around.”

Considering the undetermined but apparently huge amount of time Pawlenty has spent traveling, pursuing his ambitions and warming up John McCain’s coffee, the local media has had a hard time keeping up with the governor.

“The governors we remember are the ones who build things that make the state better for all,” says Dane Smith. “We tend not to remember those who cared only for cutting taxes and slashing the public sector or its ability to achieve common good. Nobody remembers Theodore ‘Tightwad Ted’ Christianson in the 1920s. Everybody remembers Floyd B. Olson, who instituted the state income tax and invested heavily in education.’’

Smith covered Pawlenty’s career until last year, when he left the Star Tribune to become president of Growth & Justice, a Twin Cities think tank with a progressive agenda, and he gives Pawlenty credit for aiming at homelessness and for elevating environmental concerns. And Pawlenty, he says, is one of the most politically skillful governors in decades. He says Pawlenty has become a master of the political double-entendre—saying one thing, aboveboard, that comes across as moderate to the public at large, while saying another thing on the low-down, reassuring to his conservative supporters. It’s dog whistling—a pitch only insiders can detect.

“He’s a master at sending the signals he needs to reassure his base without alarming the rest of the public,” Smith says. “He skillfully charts a course that keeps him reasonably safe with hard-line economic and social conservatives in his party, while at the same time coming across as a reasonable guy to the public and seldom using the fighting words that get so many conservatives in trouble.”

“But at some point late in his second term, he has to be getting anxious about real accomplishments and being viewed years from now simply as ‘Tightwad Tim’. ’’

Concludes Penny, “Pawlenty is a disappointment. He’s got a ton of skills and political smarts. But it never leads to results. He has more to offer than he has delivered.”

“What is his legacy?” asks one prominent Republican officeholder and insider who has been involved in Republican politics for decades. “He won’t have one. Leaders take tough issues and make something happen. Tim Pawlenty never pushes for anything the public isn’t already supporting or that he can’t do anything about. His main effort has been to keep his base happy by keeping anything from being done. He is a tool for the rich and influential. They have used him to enhance their power. Whenever he has to choose between responding to national voices or what is best for Minnesota, he pushes Minnesota to the back.

“He has turned his back on his roots.”

So who is Tim Pawlenty?

Is he the guy who, to be fair, has helped make Minnesota a leader when it comes to helping returning war veterans? Or is he the governor who has attended dozens of funerals for Minnesotans killed in Iraq without forcefully challenging the extended deployments of Minnesota National Guard units?

The guy who made global warming his priority (even many evangelical Christians have begun to embrace the issue)? Or the state leader whose appointment of an industry insider to head the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency led to controversy and confusion in the delayed uncovering of a serious water pollution problem in east metro suburbs?

The governor who wants to end homelessness? Or the one who has slashed services for the poor and the mentally ill?

The confusion over the real Pawlenty began at the beginning of his ascent in 2001. When Pawlenty found himself squeezed out of a planned run for the U.S. Senate and forced into a race for governor against right-wing, conservative Christian businessman Brian Sullivan, Pawlenty quickly became more Sullivan than Sullivan. It was a semitectonic shift.

When he was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives at thirty-two (after moving from liberal south Minneapolis to the more Republican-friendly precincts of Eagan), he sounded like a guy who might have enjoyed a friendly chat over a chai tea with R. T. Rybak. “For those people who are asked to run the 100-yard dash of life from ten yards behind, we should help them,” Pawlenty used to say. Although he made it clear that he didn’t think government was the answer for every problem, he came off as too liberal for many Republicans.

The state’s big GOP guns and antitax leaders were lined up behind Sullivan. Pawlenty, who had climbed to the post of House majority leader, found himself blocked from the job he wanted. He shifted his sights and was set to announce a run instead against Senator Paul Wellstone when fate and Dick Cheney intervened.

President Bush (which is to say, strategist Rove) wanted Norm Coleman to challenge Wellstone. With the U.S. Senate a tossup at the time, the calculation was that Coleman, who had ingratiated himself with Bush in 2000, had a better shot. The former St. Paul mayor and erstwhile DFLer had lost to Ventura in 1998 and was thinking of trying again for governor. But Rove pushed Coleman toward the Senate, and Vice President Cheney called Pawlenty with the news he was odd man out.

Pawlenty stewed, but bowed to the strong-arming and jumped into the gubernatorial contest. It would be an uphill fight to win the Republican base’s seal of approval. There is no question he had to sign the Taxpayers League of Minnesota’s “no new taxes” pledge to have a chance. He did so on the eve of the convention. The working-class hero from a meat-packing town where almost everything worthwhile was paid for by taxes had signed on to the proposition that the rich were overburdened. But turning his back on South St. Paul wasn’t his only betrayal: He also turned his back on himself.

The Sullivan forces circulated a flyer attacking Pawlenty for being soft on homosexuals: Nine years earlier, as a new legislator, Pawlenty was one of just eleven Republicans who bravely voted for a law adding gays and lesbians to the list of classes protected by the state human rights law. Under fire from Sullivan’s homophobes, Pawlenty apologized for his 1993 vote and said it was a mistake. The future governor who would be closely allied with conservative Christians, the Minnesota Family Council, and efforts to add an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting same-sex marriage, was born again, politically: this time, as a candidate who belittled homosexual rights. “God is not our ‘crutch,’ ” he told delegates, alluding to Governor Jesse Ventura’s putdown of religion. “God . . . is . . . our . . . rock !”

Dave Jennings has a hard time separating Pawlenty from his religious beliefs, which have become more public as Pawlenty has become more prominent and as McCain tried harder to appeal to the evangelical voters who seemed not to like him much. “Tim Pawlenty was a moderate Republican when I met him,” says Jennings, who was raised in a conservative church, but left politics because he believed he couldn’t do enough to please the religious conservatives who took over the state Republican party in the late 1980s. “Did he rise in the ranks of the conservatives because of his ties to the religious right? Or did his ties to the religious right strengthen as he rose?”

Maybe it’s both. But by cultivating strong personal connections to the 30 million evangelicals who mostly vote Republican, Pawlenty became a valuable commodity in the veepstakes. As his national viability rose, he began revealing more of his evangelical stuff.

Former Governor Elmer Andersen, Republican elder statesman until his death in 2004, refused to endorse Pawlenty in 2002. He told Pawlenty (who had made a pilgrimage to his Arden Hills home to seek his blessing over coffee and cookies) that he had “gone too far” in signing the “no new taxes” pledge. Later, Andersen would tell people that Pawlenty had been lucky to win in 2002.

The emotional upheaval and campaign chaos that followed is not often remembered by national media luminaries heaping praise on Pawlenty. He is portrayed simplistically as a popular figure who “won twice in a Democratic state.” Rarely mentioned is that both victories came in three-way races where he won with pluralities, not majorities. Pawlenty won 44 percent of the vote in 2002, prevailing over the DFL’s Roger Moe and Independence Party’s Tim Penny, who garnered a combined 52 percent. Pawlenty received a slightly larger plurality in 2006, winning 46.7 percent. But the DFL’s Mike Hatch, with support siphoned off by Independent Peter Hutchinson, lost by just 21,108 votes—less than 1 percent of the votes cast.

As a first-term governor, Pawlenty had gotten himself in hot water with the uncompromising ninjas of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and other anti-gummint forces when he had tried to fob off a 75-cent-a-pack cigarette “health impact fee” to help balance the state budget in 2005. The fee enraged the No New Tax Trolls, who never trusted Pawlenty and who made him so miserable he publicly stated he would never sign a pledge for any group again.

But there he was, tacitly re-upping on his “no new tax” pledge only a month after the I–35W Bridge collapse—and only a few weeks after saying he was open to whatever it took to recover from the tragedy.

Pawlenty is at his best in times of trouble: steady, low-key, reassuring. That talent worked especially well after the bridge fell. Playing preacher instead of politician, he served as state chaplain, dominating the scene—and the cameras—more as a voice of comfort and sorrow than head of government who had vetoed transportation bill after transportation bill while his running mate, Carol Molnau, who he had appointed to head the transportation agency, stood by. How he escaped the wreckage without taking a major political hit and emerged to become a contender for the vice presidency is one of Minnesota’s most amazing escape stories.

Essentially, Pawlenty let himself be the victim and in passivity got what he wanted. Or what his political higher-ups wanted. He let the legislature dispose of Molnau, who had become the face of culpability. He let the Chamber of Commerce and the Democrats take the heat for passing the paltry gas tax (5.5 cents to start, three more pennies later). And, although he stamped his foot, as Jim Abeler saw up close, he didn’t seem all that unhappy to “lose.” It was adroit shadowboxing, intended primarily to show that he was still in league with the crowd who wouldn’t pass a 1 cent tax to help a little old lady cross a potholed freeway if it was their mother.

Republican hardliners in the legislature hadn’t liked the short-lived spirit of bipartisanship that developed during the bridgeside vigils. But what reeled Pawlenty back into the fold was a shot across his bow from Grover Norquist, the high priest of the antitax movement, who had also been chaperoning Pawlenty’s ambitions. Norquist wrote to fellow travelers in the wake of the collapse, bucking up the troops across the country, telling them not to let a little bridge collapse stampede them into raising taxes. But Pawlenty’s name was not on the list of Norquist’s antitax stalwarts.

Pawlenty had been wobbling. His spokesman, Brian McClung, had told the press that the governor believed “we need to do everything we can to address this situation and the extraordinary costs.”

By September—six weeks after the bridge fell—Pawlenty’s signature was proudly attached to Norquist’s newest pledge list of antitax officials. T–Paw was back on board. “He’s quite an eloquent speaker, but his rhetoric doesn’t match his actions,” says House speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher (DFL–Minneapolis). “At the end of the day, he talked about doing things, but nothing really happened.”

By the time Minnesota’s 150th birthday was honored in May with a postal stamp featuring a picturesque bridge over the Mississippi near Winona, that bridge and half a dozen others had been shut down for repairs or replacement. But Pawlenty had absolved himself of the infrastructure crisis so thoroughly that when he delivered his annual State of the State address, he only mentioned the I–35W Bridge in passing. But the problem couldn’t be avoided: A bridge over the Mississippi in St. Cloud—visible from the windows of the auditorium where Pawlenty spoke—was shut down weeks later.

The St. Cloud speech was the one where Pawlenty theatrically brandished a red pen and called it his “taxpayer protection pen,” vowing to veto new taxes. Republican lawmakers roared and stood to applaud.

But one man did not follow their lead. Al Quie, a former Republican governor (1979–83) and, in his day, a fiscal conservative, sat silently, arms folded across his chest. He was not pleased with the performance he was watching.

On the morning of Pawlenty’s first inauguration, in 2003, a prayer service for Pawlenty at the giant Wooddale church was so exuberant—and so energetically evangelical—that Quie, a born-again Christian himself, took the occasion to caution Pawlenty. All the prayers for Jesus to guide Pawlenty were wonderful, Quie said, when it was his turn to offer a prayer. But the new governor needed to remember something: He would be governor for all Minnesotans, not just followers of Jesus.

Which leaves us at, “What’s next?” Headed to Washington? A third term as governor of Minnesota? Or a future career in telecommunications?

“I’m a believer in the collective judgment of the voters,” says Dave Jennings. “Tim Pawlenty is skating on thin ice. You can fool the voters for a while. But not forever.”