As potential Republican presidential candidates continue to demur, one who continues to push forward is Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty.
He gets an extended profile in the latest TIME:
Pawlenty likes to boast that he, more than any other candidate, will run on his record. It’s a none-too-subtle contrast with Romney, who isn’t exactly putting his Massachusetts health care reform front and center. And it’s true that Pawlenty governed as a conservative in the state that produced Walter Mondale and that hasn’t voted Republican for President since 1972. “He managed to take the anger — the snarl, if you will — out of the hard-core social and economic extremist-conservative agenda,” says Dane Smith, a former reporter who covered Pawlenty for years.
As governor, Pawlenty brought a return to normality and a conservative style. He removed from the governor’s mansion a portrait of Ventura in knight’s armor on a white horse and replaced it with one of an old man praying, and he imported his foosball table from home. Ventura had left behind a $4.5 billion deficit, which Pawlenty closed not by raising taxes (which he would slash by $800 million over the course of his term) but by dramatically slowing spending. He vetoed dozens of Democratic tax-hike bills, and in 2005 he allowed a nine-day state-government shutdown rather than give in to the Democrats’ budget demands.
Before you get too excited, the article also details Pawlenty’s dubious record on climate change and other issues that have made Minnesota conservatives cringe.
