A Personable Empty Suit, by Careful, Conscious Design

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.’’