In my opinion, Pawlenty acting all "tough" when he pulled out the knives against Bachmann was pure posturing, and not in him at all. You could almost see in his face that he was dreadfully uncomfortable doing it. It made him appear desperate. And Bachmann turned back his blades deftly. And again, the look on Pawlenty's face as he delivered his scathing comments was almost broadcasting in advance that he knew she was going to fire back and his effort would be wasted.
The intelligentsia is making this out to be T-Paw's moment where he finally put Bachmann in her place. I don't see it that way at all.
That said, he does have a point about executive experience, and effectiveness in the legislature. Bachmann's role has been to stand for conservative principles and against the expansion of government. She is a wedge; a lever; prying back against an ever-encroaching behemoth. But she has not proactively initiated anything noteworthy in congress to turn back the tide. She has been the definition of "standing her ground".
The Presidency is all about proactively initiating an agenda. To gauge her on that basis, her resume is very thin. What we have is her character, and a gut-check of what we think someone of her character would do.
That's what people thought they were voting for with Obama. It will be easy to make the correlation between thin resume and executive inexperience, and Obama/Bachmann .