Tim Pawlenty: Man of the Moment for a New GOP?

I first met Tim Pawlenty when he came by for an interview with Newsweek reporters and editors at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minnesota. He had been passed over for the vice presidency, and the slight was still raw. You could tell he was hurting -- more by his body language than anything he said. He walked us through the vice-presidential vetting process, which for him was quite extensive, as questions swirled about how much the Republican nominee, John McCain, knew about Sarah Palin, his surprise pick, and the pregnancy of her teenage daughter, which dominated news coverage as the convention got under way.

The consensus around the table after an hour with Pawlenty was that McCain had made the wrong decision in passing over the solid and serious Midwesterner in favor of a mystery woman with soap-opera baggage. l don't think McCain could have won the election regardless of who he picked, but if he'd chosen Pawlenty, he would have positioned a next-generation candidate who is more plausible as a nominee with broad appeal than Palin, whose passionate following is restricted to a relatively small sliver of the electorate.

My next encounter with Pawlenty was at an education-reform meeting last year where he shared top billing with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, aligning himself with the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" initiatives. I remember thinking that while he's a conservative, he's not in the far-right camp that once fantasized abolishing the Department of Education. And when he met with reporters in Washington Monday morning at a breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor, among the points he made was that he comes from the state that produced Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Jesse Ventura, Paul Wellstone and Al Franken, among other progressive icons. "I'm a bit of an interloper as a conservative Republican," he noted.

His message, delivered throughout the hour-long breakfast, is that he can co-exist and even thrive outside the GOP's comfort zone. He goes down easy even when he's embracing his party's right-wing dogma. He's "Minnesota Nice," as my colleague Jill Lawrence points out. That could be a handicap in today's ruthless politics, but it could also serve him well with an electorate tired of the rhetorical baiting that politicians do, and it could preserve relationships within the GOP to secure him a spot on the ticket in the event he falls short of winning the nomination.
He's hoping to ride the new diversity wave within the GOP, stressing that he's not a CEO like you-know-who (He didn't mention Mitt Romney by name; he didn't have to). Pawlenty is working class, the son of a truck driver. Of his other major rival, Sarah Palin, whom he did mention by name, he said she can wait longer than others to declare her intentions.

He'll make a decision early next year, but in reality he's already made the decision – devoting the next two years to full-time running, the playbook that Jimmy Carter as an unknown former governor with time on his hands successfully pioneered in 1974-'76. At this point, Pawlenty seems as unlikely as Carter did (Jimmy who?), but at the very least, given the swing state he's from and those working-class roots, he could continue the Minnesota tradition. The state has produced two vice presidents, Humphrey and Mondale, and as a reporter noted, the perennial presidential candidate, the late Harold Stassen, hailed from the same St. Paul area as Pawlenty. "He probably ran too many times but we're proud of him," Pawlenty said, sounding like a man who knows what it's like to be passed over, but then again, given his state's history, maybe the third time is the charm. "Who best to open the door to people not yet Republicans?" he said, a line that he offered as a criteria for selecting the next GOP nominee and which happens to sum up his pitch to be the one.