COMMENTARY | Sagging poll numbers and a shortage of campaign cash had bedeviled the Tim Pawlenty campaign for the presidency even before the Ames Straw Poll. But a third place showing convinced the former Minnesota governor to toss it in.
The conventional wisdom held up Pawlenty as the perfect Republican candidate for president. He was calm, quiet, Midwestern governor who did not have much of a rambunctious style. The inside the beltway Washington pundits especially liked that last quality. Pawlenty had governed Minnesota, the birthplace of liberal firebrands such as Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, and Paul Wellstone, in a more or less conservative way. After the turmoil and chaos of the Obama years, someone calm and reassuring was just the ticket-or so the reasoning it.
The problem was that the voters, at least those contacted by pollsters, never bought the package. While Pawlenty had cut spending as governor, he had also supported cap and trade. Just as with Mitt Romney’s support for health care reform, that tended to be a problem with many Republican voters. To be sure, Pawlenty had recanted and had admitted his mistake, but the damage was done.
In any event, if voters wanted someone who was clam and reassuring, that already had Romney, a man who talks as smooth as he dresses. And even greater problem, most of the voters are not buying calm and reassurance. They want passion, fire in the belly. They want someone who can look at the chaos swirling around and express the outrage they feel in their hearts. For that purposes, there are candidates and potential candidates aplenty.
Michele Bachmann, for example, demands fiscal accountability and lays into Obama economic policy like the Biblical judge Deborah against the Philistines. Rick Perry has just announced with the air of John Wayne arriving in a western town overtaken by outlaws, ready to do what a man’s gotta do. And Sarah Palin is waiting in the wings like Glorianna at Hatfield House, laying out pulse pounding snark on her Facebook page and on the stump when she makes her forays into the public eye, as she did at the Iowa State Fair. Some people see Palin as Boudicca descending on London and quake in their shoes. Some see the same thing and quiver with anticipation.
The truth of the matter is, political campaigns against sitting presidents are not about calm and reassurance. They are about throwing the bum out. And for that, one needs to lend fire to ones rhetoric. Pawlenty could never manage that, which was his ultimate undoing.
Source: Pawlenty quits race for president after disappointment in Iowa, Jonathan Martin And Marin Cogan, Politico, August 14, 2011