I don’t read the “City Pages” all that much – while ten years ago it frequently did better long-form reporting than the dailies, today it’s a glorified college paper/ad handout.

Still, it’s good for the occasional laugh.

We’ve discussed Emily Kaiser before.  She seems to have inherited the political beat from the likes of GR Anderson and Mike Mosedale (themselves guys with, let’s say, opportunities as political reporters and commentators).

And like a lot of inheritances, it’s not working all that well, in this piece entitled “Republicans Don’t Really Like Pawlenty”.  See if you can figure out the problem with that premise before Ms. Kaiser does.  I’ll add emphasis for the benefit of anyone who takes the City Pages seriously:

The Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll must have been a real blow to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s confidence this weekend. It turns out Republicans don’t like him much. He was seriously beat out by real winners in life: Gov. Bobby Jindal (Kenneth the Page) and Gov. Sarah Palin. That really hurts.

At CPAC’s annual conference Saturday in Washington, Republicans participated in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates. Pawlenty received just 2 percent of the vote, was second to last, and only beat out Charlie Crist.

Kaiser misses the blazingly obvious, even though she write the answer in black and white.

Emilyi It was the Conservative Political Action Conference!  Not the “Republican Political Action Conference”. Many Republicans are not conservatives.  Many – Chuck Hagel, Jim Ramstad, Ron Erhard, Olympia Snowe – are indistinguishable from Democrats.
And while you, Emily, are a Minnesota liberal who would seem to have trouble telling Arne Carlson apart from Rush Limbaugh, Pawlenty is no doctrinaire conservative.  Oh, he ran to the right to get nominated in 2002; he’s tried, against increasingly long odds, to hold the line on the the DFL’s psychotic spending.

But – and I realize this is tough for you, Emily, who have no doubt been trained to think that Republicans and Conservatives are monochrome thud-wits – Pawlenty is not seen as a movement conservative.

So the “Conservative Political Action Conference” might be expected to vote for…

…what?

Conservatives.

Like Romney and Jindal and Palin, and not the likes of Pawlenty and Crist.

It’s not a sign that Pawlenty’s in trouble with Repblicans.  It’s a sign that he either has to burnish his credentials among conservatives (and I think conservatives sell him short) or hope that there is a sea of disenfranchised moderates out there.