A Personable Empty Suit, by Careful, Conscious Design

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.