Tim Pawlenty looked good on paper.
Pawlenty had been twice elected governor in Minnesota, a
Democratic state, yet he did not have the liberal baggage of an
Obamacare-like health care law or flip-flops on abortion and other
social issues. He was an executive who balanced budgets and
(arguably) didn’t raise taxes. He was from the Midwest, a region
where Republicans needed to do well. He came from a blue-collar
background. He was both an evangelical and a former Catholic.
It was an open secret that Pawlenty planned to seek the
Republican presidential nomination almost as soon as Barack Obama
was elected. Pawlenty had been a runner-up to Sarah Palin in John
McCain’s vice presidential sweepstakes. He received a lot of
favorable attention from conservative pundits, especially those
who
hoped he would mix his pro-life views with middle
class-friendly economic policies to build a “party of
Sam’s Club.”
Perhaps most important of all to reporters with visions of a
President Pawlenty dancing in their heads, when the former governor
did decide to put together a presidential campaign, he hired
quality staffers and respected consultants. There was just one
problem with all this: the polls showed very little support for a
Pawlenty candidacy among the real, live voters who would actually
decide the Republican nomination.
As 2011 wore on, those poll numbers barely budged. Maybe it was
just name recognition, pundits suggested. But Herman Cain and
Michele Bachmann started out with similarly low name recognition,
only to quickly bypass Pawlenty in popular standing. It’s still
early, we reminded ourselves. Now here it is August, still months
before the first binding contest of 2012, and Pawlenty is already
out of the race.
There was nothing wrong with speculating that Pawlenty would
have made a strong candidate for the Republican nomination. While I
had my doubts as to whether Pawlenty’s record or rhetoric matched
to mood of the GOP primary electorate, I found the theoretical case
for him quite plausible myself.
But the mainstream and, to a lesser extent, conservative media
were slow to let go of these theories even as they increasingly did
not mesh with the facts on the ground. It wasn’t until it began to
leak out that the campaign was having trouble paying
those staffers and consultants that reporters began to cover
Pawlenty as a dead man walking. By the time the Ames straw poll
rolled around, it was clear something had to give. On Sunday, that
something was Pawlenty’s presidential aspirations.
CONTRAST THIS WITH the media’s treatment of Ron Paul, who
received twice as many votes in the straw poll as Pawlenty and lost
to Bachmann by less than one percentage point. Paul has been
running ahead of Pawlenty in scientific polls for months. USA
Today/Gallup found Paul at 14 percent nationally compared to
Pawlenty’s 3 percent; CNN had him at 12 percent to Pawlenty’s 2
percent. In the RealClearPolitics
polling average, Paul is closer to Bachmann and Sarah Palin
while Pawlenty is closer to the rear.
Yet Paul is treated as an afterthought. The Washington
Post’s Chris Cillizza
wrote before Ames that it wouldn’t mean much if Paul finished
first. Another reporter blogged
“a Paul win would help to diminish the overall process in Iowa to
outsiders.” Pawlenty himself was
prepared to use the rationale that Bachmann and Paul were less
credible than he, until the two Tea Party favorites bounced him out
of the race entirely.
All this is somewhat understandable. If Pawlenty’s Iowa strategy
had panned out and he got to go one-on-one against Mitt Romney, he
had a hypothetical path to the nomination. Paul’s best case
scenario is probably doing reasonably well in the early states, the
caucuses, and the Interior West, and even then it is difficult to
chart out a path to the nomination for him that doesn’t involve a
lot of imagination.
Many reporters feel burned by Paul last time. When he beat the
other Republican candidates in fundraising during the fourth
quarter of 2007 and experienced a slight uptick in the polls, the
media paid more attention to his candidacy. Then he didn’t win any
primaries or caucuses, finishing outside the top three in Iowa and
New Hampshire. But that’s no excuse for pretending his poll numbers
now are lower than Pawlenty’s or Jon Huntsman’s when they are
clearly not.
Ultimately, pundits — no matter how clever — don’t decide
elections. Voters do.
There will be plenty of postmortems focusing on what Pawlenty
did wrong. But let’s not forget that the media too was wrong to
anoint Pawlenty too soon because he looked good on paper.
