News just broke that Tim Pawlenty has dropped out of the Presidential race, after coming in a weak third in the Iowa caucus.<\/p>\n
On the one hand, he got a bad rap; he’s a great stump speaker, and those who said was “too blah” have no idea what he did when facing two DFL chambers in the legislature.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, his campaign focused on electability rather than principle – a strategy that, along with his record, could have worked in the GOP of 2000 or 2004. But this year’s crop is all about the principle; firebrand conservativm sells.<\/p>\n
While Pawlenty got painted with the “moderate” brush – one he certainly deserved in the state House – he was a political engineer who worked that could be fairly called miracles on the conservative issue that matters most, budgets and taxation.<\/p>\n
I’d hoped he’d go a lot farther.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
News just broke that Tim Pawlenty has dropped out of the Presidential race, after coming in a weak third in the Iowa caucus. On the one hand, he got a bad rap; he’s a great stump speaker, and those who said was “too blah” have no idea what he did when facing two DFL chambers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21723,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21722\/revisions\/21723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}