One got the impression that Paw was reading off other candidates note cards in a vain attempt to paint himself as a genuine man. Thankfully it failed. As for the book, that was another thing he lifted from others.
Posted on 08/14/2011 10:19:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Tim Pawlenty is exiting the race for the White House the same way he came in — on a tidal wave of conventional wisdom.
He was too even-tempered, they say, to catch on with a white-hot electorate. He was too level-headed, they say, to connect with a grassroots that’s gone to extremes. He was a nice guy — “boring,” in the parlance of our times — so he finished last.
Breaking news: The conventional wisdom is wrong. Pawlenty’s personality problem wasn’t a charisma deficit — it was a wimpiness surplus.
But the wimp factor is meaningless relative to the flaw that doomed his candidacy. As Ron Paul has amply proven, a certain kind of message can propel even the most unlikely of messengers deep into a crowded field.
Pawlenty is out, and out first, for one reason and one reason only.
It’s not Pawlenty. It’s Pawlentyism.
Tim Pawlenty is the canary in the establishment coal mine. His message — that the Republican Party doesn’t need to rethink any of its main policy propositions — no longer computes with a critical mass of Republican voters: not just in Ames, Iowa, but nationwide.
Paul and his (growing) army of faithful are no longer the lone data point. Michele Bachmann has built her campaign around a radical alternative to Republican spending orthodoxy. Sarah Palin fuels hopes of an even broader renunciation of the Republican establishment.
Even Mitt Romney now knows better than to re-run his losing proto-Pawlentyist campaign from 2008, when his change-nothing play for the mushy conservative middle left him obliged to spend millions to avoid T-Paw’s glum fate.
But time is running out on Romney’s current luxurious alternative, the anti-campaign. Rather than serving pabulum, Romney has served nothing; pointing a finger at Obama has been enough. No longer. He will have to offer, like any Republican candidate serious about claiming the nomination, a fundamental departure from the miasma of convention that clings to the Republican brand.
It’s not that Pawlenty’s brand of mainstream, fusionist conservatism is wrong. It’s that it misses the point. The principles are necessary, but the policies Pawlentyism derives from them are inadequate to the daunting task that Americans have — let’s face it — set before themselves.
Given how grievously we’ve undercalculated the real debt burdens at the state, local, and federal levels, an “ambitious goal” of 5% economic growth is not just absurd but dangerously so. (Perhaps real growth is in reach with a massive and open-ended influx of immigrants who are ready to work cheap and stay off entitlements. Good luck with that.)
Given how weary America has become of its network of military actions, a bear-any-burden approach to muscular interventionism sweeps all our serious strategic questions under the rug. (Note: We Americans are fine with wars. It’s the massive and open-ended imperial mission of garrisoning “restive tribal areas” that we rightly lose patience for.)
And given how deeply all economic classes have been penetrated by dependency on perpetual federal wealth transfers, the “Sam’s Club Republicanism” that anointed Pawlenty its poster boy cannot be taken seriously when it proposes to “reform” the country and the GOP by replacing our system of targeted tax credits with one of out-and-out wage subsidies.
The cultural and economic problems America confronts are structural. The lifelong biological family is unable to reliably function as a source of social order. The size and scope of the criminal justice system is unsustainable and corrosive. The magnitude of privately held debt spins nightmare scenarios in the heads of policymakers already hesitant to undo a system of governance dedicated above all to artificially maintaining for Americans of every class a lifestyle many of them could not accomplish on their own.
That may feel compassionate — or even merely prudent — but on anything more than the most shortsighted of timelines, it is neither. The endemic subsidization on which our virtual prosperity depends is incompatible with any fair view of Americans as a free people. And against that most serious charge, Pawlentyism — no matter how conservative in its convictions, commitments, and attitudes — has no answer.
Does any Republican approach? For now, it’s difficult to answer yes. But the contours of a satisfactory alternative to establishment drift are easy to recognize.
In foreign policy, end our indefinite military garrisons, increase our ability to poke hard with a sharp stick at key moments and help our cornerstone allies in Europe and Asia better assert a constant regional presence.
On criminal justice, legalize soft drugs, clean up the appeals and capital punishment process, overhaul our corrupt (and corrupting) prison system, and reform and reintegrate felons.
On border issues, permit brief stays for true migrant workers, and demand an immediate choice between citizenship and deportation for resident illegal immigrants without criminal records.
On social issues, embrace the Tenth Amendment, and work to defeat and reverse judges who don’t just legislate from the bench but philosophize.
And on the defining issue of our time — subsidy and entitlement spending writ large — begin the urgent task of painstakingly unraveling the cocoon of incentives, payoffs, behavioral modifications, and socioeconomic engineering that has forced well-off, middle-class, working-class, and poor Americans to choose between greater prosperity and greater independence.
There’s no reason a Republican candidate can’t embrace these or similar positions. They amount to a post-establishmentarian vision of governance that steps outside the box created by misleading categories like “extreme” on the one hand and “centrist” on the other. And they sharply rebuke the sitting president.
Tim Pawlenty didn’t flop because Iowans are crackpots or Tea Partiers are wingnuts. It’s not extremism along the traditional political spectrum that grassroots Republicans (and independents and others) want. It’s an extreme departure from that spectrum, which has become — to say nothing of the parlous state of the left — a license and excuse for a great drift into inadequacy by conventional fusionism on the right.
If the candidates counted as the winners in the wake of Pawlenty’s departure don’t grasp that fact, they might have beaten him, but they’ll have joined him, too.
He was a dull boring RINO... Not sure how he kept wining in Minnesota.
T-Paw was facing an uphill battle to begin with. He governed as a moderate and was just too vanilla. There was no dynamism.
But he really doomed himself when he wimped out on confronting Romney to his face over Obamneycare.
If he’s not going to stand up to Romney, how can we trust that he would stand up to Obama?
He crossed swords with Michele Bachmann unnecessarily and more than once. I gave him a little money once but repent.
He took a swing at Michele and she destroyed him,hit the guy with a List of mistakes he made,DONE!!
“He will have to offer, like any Republican candidate serious about claiming the nomination, a fundamental departure from the miasma of convention that clings to the Republican brand.”
The attitude that Romney can just change the words that he says and his RINO record can magically go away is flawed.
Romney is an establishment RINO. This is not a good year to be an establishment RINO. Tough luck Romney, tough luck Perry, tough luck all establishment RINOs.
If you have statism all over your resume, if you have globalism all over your resume, the tea party is not having it.
That’s a lot of blather for, “get a haircut”.
The magnitude of privately held debt spins nightmare scenarios in the heads of policymakers already hesitant to undo a system of governance dedicated above all to artificially maintaining for Americans of every class a lifestyle many of them could not accomplish on their own.
I appreciate your post.
We’ll see ‘bout how it all goes...
I live in Minnesota and know of Pawlenty. On the campaign trail he bragged how he balanced the budget here. BS, he left us a 6.2 billion budget deficit and owing the schools billions more.
When Northwest Airlines was having labor trouble with its mechanics, Pawlenty was bought off and provided no fight in saving Minnesota 40-50K jobs.
He wrote a book ‘Courage to Stand’… what a fake, do nothing, scab loving wimp.
This piece is dead on. It also shows some signs of hope that Mittens will eventually be eliminated. He is not that far off from Paws in policies. Mittens is the defender of the “business as usual” crowd this election. That will have limited millage with the current GOP electorate.
I have no doubt he would have made a competent President, but he is not an agent of conservative change, he has a right bent or leaning, but not a true commitment to a right wing way to doing things. He lacked dogmatic conservative thinking, and he came across as phony when he tried to emote any kind of passion talking to the base, its not him. He actually had less passion and fire then say a Mitch Daniels would (I also think he is less of a governor then Daniels, who has what Pawlenty has but in spades, and he probably would have suffered a similar fate).
In other words, he's the kind of guy you hire to carry something out, a manager, he is not the kind of guy, you make your face, or put in charge of having a vision.
One got the impression that Paw was reading off other candidates note cards in a vain attempt to paint himself as a genuine man. Thankfully it failed. As for the book, that was another thing he lifted from others.
Now we got Dayton, worse yet.
Over the past several decades, for the first time in history and at an ever-doubling pace, Americans have run up credit cards, high loan-to-value mortgages and home equity loans, new car loans, personal loans (for big-screen TVs and a zillion other toys), school loans, loans for vacations, loans for this, loans for that... all for the purpose of living high on the hog today with the idea that everything will be paid off sometime in the distant future. Always, in the distant future. The installment plan - - it’s all about squeezing as much fun and cool stuff out of a weekly paycheck as a 30-year payment plan will allow.
The common mindset has been, “Get complete gratification today, pay for it tomorrow.” Then, the cars depreciate, the TVs and toys break, the vacations and casino trips leave fading memories, and the parties come to an end. But paying for it all, well... that continues for the next 30 years. But it’s okay - - just borrow some more and do it again, and push an even bigger day of reckoning out another 10, 15, or 30 years.
Naturally, the banks and the government have worked hard to become accomodating enablers. At least, they were accomodating enablers until recently... Oops.
Of course, the government itself has operated in exactly the same Ponzi-schemish way even more recklessly than the selfish, ignorant chattering class it has enabled.
Gee, who saw this depression coming?
The day of reckoning has come a little earlier than many expected. (Ha! Doesn’t it always?) It is finally time to pay the piper.
It was inevitable.
No way is a Democrat ever going to stand up and deliver the bad news. Democrats are cowards just as surely as they are liars. So who is the Republican who will lead America out of its mess?
I have no freaking idea.
I think this is on target. I listened to Pawlenty speak, once or twice, but never heard him say a thing. And his unwarranted attacks on fellow republicans before the primary season even began was atrocious judgment. He lost because there really was no reason to vote for him.
Courage to stand ? … The only place he stood was in line for big business handouts.
He campaigned on creating jobs. More BS, he sat back and took big business money and watched 50 thousand plus jobs leave his state.
He’s a fake !
This is a shill piece for Ron Paul. Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
I like chocolate on my donuts
yeah, pretty much to the point....
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