Tomorrow, after months of crisscrossing the country in an informal campaign, Tim Pawlenty is expected to officially announce his campaign for the presidency. But even after all those visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, even after completing two terms as governor of Minnesota, even after being on John McCain's short list of vice-presidential candidates, Pawlenty still is struggling in the polls.
Why? Why are voters so lukewarm? What has former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney -- 20 percent support among likely Republican primary voters in a May 18 poll, vs. 3 percent for Pawlenty -- got that Pawlenty hasn't got?
The answer is a list of successful initiatives that won bipartisan support.
Pawlenty's weakness is what many people think of as his greatest strength: his record as governor. For as governor, Pawlenty did not build bridges in the Legislature and did not try to attract much Democratic support.
That's why his signature achievement is neither an education initiative, civil-service reform nor even a solid and balanced budget. It's simply the fact that he blocked most efforts to raise taxes -- and in presidential politics, even Republican presidential politics, that's not enough.
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That's why Romney is ahead. Besides steering a management consulting firm and the 2002 Winter Olympics, Romney signed a signature Massachusetts health care law: "Romneycare." It's a controversial item on his resume
today, but there's no denying it was a significant bipartisan feat.
That's why Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is talked about so excitedly as well. "In his last gubernatorial election, Daniels won more votes than anyone in Indiana history, including a majority of the youth vote and 20 percent of the black vote, unheard-of numbers for a conservative Republican," The Atlantic magazine noted last week.
The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal, explained Daniel's appeal: "When Daniels took office in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn't balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession."
Pawlenty's record rivals that of Daniels in one respect: the creation of Lake Vermilion State Park, a true bipartisan achievement.
But few of his other initiatives drew significant Democratic support. The Legislature did pass a bipartisan bill to raise the gas tax for the first time in 20 years. But it did so over Pawlenty's veto when six House Republicans broke ranks.
The governor's partisanship brought disappointing results. "Today, Minnesota is struggling with a projected budget deficit of $5 billion, which some blame on Pawlenty," Time magazine reports in a profile of Pawlenty this week.
"'I don't think any governor has left behind a worse financial mess than he has,' says Arne Carlson, a Republican who was Minnesota's governor from 1991 to 1999."
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Pawlenty often says his strength is that he can win in Democratic-leaning states, as he did in Minnesota. But "this, too, oversimplifies the record," Time concludes.
"Pawlenty was no electoral Kirby Puckett. He won both his statewide races with less than 50 percent of the vote. He was barely re-elected, by 21,000 votes, in 2006. In each race, the presence of a third-party candidate likely fractured the state's mostly Democratic voters to his advantage. ..."
Last fall, Pawlenty's handpicked GOP successor, for whom he campaigned, was defeated. And at least one recent poll has shown Pawlenty running behind Obama in the state, calling into question whether he could really deliver Minnesota's 10 electoral votes to the GOP next November."That last observation has got to hurt. But it fully explains Pawlenty's predicament:
If Minnesotans aren't excited, other Americans won't be excited either.
Like Minnesota, America needs bipartisan solutions - solutions that will hold up over time and across shifting majorities. But Pawlenty signed few such initiatives as governor; moreover, he didn't seem to care.
No wonder voters are skeptical that he'll forge bipartisan solutions in Washington.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
