IDP, I respect your opinion, but disagree about Pawlenty.
I see him as just another moderate.
For me, he would be one of those I'd hold my nose for but would vote for....
I'm just relating my impression after 8 years of Pawlenty as my governor. I think labeling him as a "moderate" is accurate in that he is mild-mannered, not in-your-face, and typically political in his demeanor and rhetoric. That kind of demeanor is not what I would choose for this critical moment in history. And he supported McCain, even though he's nothing like McCain.
But he is not politically moderate. He's conservative/center-right, both fiscally and socially. He held the line in every way he could. That means that when he was elected and the MN legislature was in the hands of the GOP, he cut taxes, returned the budget surplus to the people, cut spending, signed concealed carry, and basically governed as conservatively as he could get away with in MN, and as conservatively as one could have desired.
Then he lost the legislature. He was forced to compromise on certain things for the rest of his tenure, but he always fought hard for conservatives, and he always forced the Democrats to come his way, rather than just capitulating. When the Democrats refused to budge, he was not afraid to use executive orders to slash spending. He even tried to implement a de facto line item veto to thwart them. Even though state law has no such provision, he had the temerity to find a technicality that could act as a LIV, and he used it, even though the Democrats and the local media wailed and gnashed their teeth.
His cardinal sin was embracing Global Warming and its bastard-child, Cap-n-Trade. But a lot of good people were swayed by the false scientific claims. He has full-throatedly denounced his embrace of Cap-n-Trade. One must decide whether he genuinely changed his mind, whether he rejects it now because of political opportunism, or whether he embraced it in the first place because of political opportunism. I think he believed what he was being told.
If Pawlenty gets the nomination, he won't be my first choice, and I have little confidence he can win. But in my opinion, America and the GOP could do a HELL of a lot worse. Of the people who it appears are going to run, only Palin, Bachmann, and Cain garner my enthusiastic support. I would crawl across broken glass for miles for any of them. But if they can't get the nomination, Pawlenty is next in line for me, unless someone else jumps in or something else changes. He's a good man. Trustworthy. He's milquetoast, when we need steel. But he's reliably conservative, and we need that.
