Ask a Minnesotan about Tim Pawlenty’s legacy. What do you think they’ll say?
Nothing. As long as most Minnesotans, like most Americans, are working and paying their bills and not getting blown up in their offices by terrorists, most Americans don’t care that much about politics.
Outside the month or two before an election, I’m going to guess that 60% of Minnesotans, or Americans in general, don’t care about politics, and of the 40% remaining, 35% might work up some interest over one or two issues – guns, abortion, taxes, gay marriage, whatever. The remaining 5% – the political class and its hangers-on, and people like me, most of my readers and listeners and people like all of us. That’s not a lot of people.
Unless, of course, they’re out of work, coming up short on the rent, or facing some other dire threat.
Which is why most Minnesotans, our “legendary” civic-mindedness notwithstanding, don’t really care much about politics other than between Labor Day and the first Tuesday in November every even-numbered year; because even in hard times, Minnesota generally has had things pretty good. Few booms (like the North Dakota oil boom of the late seventies), few rust-belty busts.
And so after three years of the Housing Recession, Minnesota is doing generally well, with unemployment well below the national average. Minnesota came out of the Pawlenty years as well as could be expected and, looking at the record of large states that had liberal legislatures from 2006 through 2010, considerably better than it had a right to expect.
For the Democrats nationally and the DFL locally, and the media that seems more than ever to be serving them both, the mission then is to turn the classic drill sergeant’s aphorism on its head; they need to take paté and convince the world it’s b**s**t.
In the Strib, Kevin Diaz tells the world “don’t believe all those numbers, and what you see with your own eyes throughout Minnesota; listen to the DFL’s spin!” in his look back at the Pawlenty era and ahead to a potential Pawlenty presidency:
Debuting a sweeping economic plan in Chicago this month, Tim Pawlenty said he could lead the nation to “a better deal” of prosperity and balanced budgets.
“I know government can cut spending,” he said, “because I did it in Minnesota.”
Conservatives like former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch publicly embraced his small-government vision of dramatic tax and budget cuts. But a host of economists and liberal critics questioned the former Minnesota governor’s scenario of unprecedented economic growth — and the trillions of dollars in exploding deficits that could result if it doesn’t come true.
Which, to be fair, is their job – to sit at the periphery of the public discussion and chant “don’t believe your own eyes; it would have been so much better with more taxes!”
Even before his closely watched speech at the Chicago School of Business, Pawlenty’s past was on display on the campaign trail, starting with the first nationally televised presidential debate in South Carolina last month, when he was asked to explain a projected $5 billion shortfall on the day he left office.
Pawlenty rejected the figure, arguing it assumed “outrageous” future spending levels that he doesn’t support. “This idea that there’s a deficit and I left it in Minnesota is not accurate,” he said.
And Pawlenty is right. The “deficit” was against a spending forecast – basically the numbers that the DFL-controlled bureaucracy gave to the then-DFL-controlled legislature. It was a win-win for the DFL, heading into an election they they thought they’d leave with at least a chamber of the Legislature; if a Democrat won the Governor’s office, it’d be a gimme to start the budget talks at the inflated level; if the GOP won, it’d be a rhetorical cudgel, a big number that the DFL and their servants in the media could repeat uncritically to that 95% of Minnesotans who just don’t pay attention to politics outside of election season, if at all
Like all such chanting points, it takes three seconds to say – “Pawlenty left a five billion dollar deficit!” – and a minute to refute; the DFL and the media know that to the 95% of Minnesotans who don’t care about politics outside of election time, a one-minute explanation might as well be two hours, for all the good it’ll do; the three second sound bite sticks. Also, it’s a lie.
But Pawlenty’s fiscal record in Minnesota, so central to his quest for the White House, continues to dog him as the 2012 presidential race heats up and DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and the Minnesota Legislature grapple with a multibillion-dollar budget gap.
But to be fair to Pawlenty, the figure was designed to do no more.
Read the rest of Diaz’ piece. More, perhaps, tomorrow.
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