a few thoughts on the Pawlenty defeat...
A scene immediately comes to mind tonight as MN GOV primary results roll in, with Pawlenty finished. The scene: spring 2011. Pawlenty a GOP WH favorite. Nick Ayers, the wunderkind, on board. Donors mostly going to Romney, but many like TPaw. He meets with me and a few reporters.
Pawlenty is confident but skittish about the rise of Bachmann. He's preaching his own version of populism (wapo.st/2PbrkdB), "Sam's Club conservatism" that's embraced by Brooks and Salam and Douthat. He tells us that's the GOP future: winning over the working class.
Pawlenty details his whole plan, his path to the nom. Sounds doable. Yet his delivery and his presentation are mild. It's the opposite style of Bachmann, who is roaring anti-establishment. And it's the opposite of a birtherism advocate from NYC making headlines at the time.
Pawlenty, of course, goes on to drop out. Bachmann wins the Ames straw poll that summer but eventually fades. Months later, Rick Santorum, back from political winter, takes up many working-class talking points that are similar to T-Paw's and gives Romney a real race.
A few years later, sitting on a plane with Trump, I bring up Santorum and Pawlenty, and the flashes of populism in the party from 2012 cycle. Trump quickly dismisses the conversation and calls his brand of politics "common sense," not some ideological project.
What Trump saw, and Bachmann saw, and Santorum saw, to an extent, was that in the modern GOP, being a "Sam's Club Republican" is not enough. You cannot respond to economic anxieties with a policy program. Voters want visceral political campaigns, solidarity in grievance.
Pawlenty's comeback bid in MN was encouraged by GOP leaders and donors because it looked like not only a way to win the governor's mansion, but a way to reassure themselves that someone like him could still be a player. Mild-mannered, Sam's Club pitch but loved by C-Suite types.
But the GOP is transformed. Ayers works for Trump. Bachmann is gone, but her right-wing immigration views (her best pal in House was Steve King) dominate the party.
Pawlenty may feel burned tonight, but it's just a version of what he went thru in 2011. And the fire rages. /end
Pawlenty may feel burned tonight, but it's just a version of what he went thru in 2011. And the fire rages. /end
