RALEIGH – Those of you who just read the headline of this column and are either enraged or elated, take a deep breath – I’m not talking about trading North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue for, say, a fourth-round draft pick and some magic beans.
The governors I’m talking about who got traded this weekend were Republicans. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty exited the GOP presidential field after a disappointing showing in the Iowa straw poll. And current Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the GOP presidential field, seeking to unite the conservative base of the party with those stil looking for statewide electoral and executive experience in their 2012 nominee.
First, a word about Tim Pawlenty. Republican apologists for the man repeatedly said that he was about as conservative a governor as Minnesota was ever likely to have.
Sometimes apologists are right. Pawlenty is an impressive politician. Given the political realities he faced, Pawlenty advanced the conservative agenda effectively in Minnesota, first as a legislative leader and then as a two-term governor. He made some missteps – doesn’t everybody? – but Pawlenty deserved to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate who mixed free-market policies with proven leadership skills.
As far as I can tell, most people did take Tim Pawlenty seriously. They just never took to him as a presidential candidate. It happens. Pawlenty may have seemed charismatic within the confines of “Minnesota nice” back home. But to GOP activists and donors, he was boring. Then, to shake his rep as a bore, Pawlenty tried to reinvent himself as an attack dog. But the new role never had any, uh, bite.
The Iowa straw poll proved to be a sort of Thunderdome for political neighbors with presidential aspirations: two Minnesotans enter, one Minnesotan leaves. The victor was Michele Bachmann, whom I doubt will be the GOP nominee in 2012 but who is also likely to be in the race for the duration.
I’ve always thought that, in the end, the Republican Party would nominate a governor or former governor to challenge Barack Obama. I thought it would be Pawlenty, Perry, or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Now we can strike the first name. That yields the real race, in my view: Perry vs. Romney.
As Ramesh Ponnuru put it in his Bloomberg News column, the two candidates have some striking similarities. Both are emphasizing economic issues, pointing to their past records of job creation (Perry in the public sector and Romney mostly in the private sector) as evidence that they can take the jobs issue directly to Obama and make it stick.
Both say that Washington has too much power, and the states, localities, and private citizens have too little. Both want to repeal ObamaCare, though Romney has an obvious problem criticizing the individual mandate on anything but federalist grounds. And both say that no final deal on the nation’s long-term fiscal problems should include tax increases or exclude a balanced-budget amendment to the federal constitution.
But as political personalities, Perry and Romney are like night and day. One is a loose-talking Southern pol, the other a crisp-talking Northern exec. Their accents, faiths, and family backgrounds are just as strikingly dissimilar as their main talking points are similar.
Right now, I have no sense of which is the likelier bet for the nomination. As for departure of Tim Pawlenty from the race, I’ll just point out this one salient fact that far too many political pundits have overlooked: Pawlenty chose to cater his straw-poll campaign with barbecue from a Minnesota restaurant rather than a local Iowa one.
I’m all for home-state loyalty. I eat Bass Farm Country Sausage and drink Cheerwine in the afternoon, I’ll have you know. (The proper soda for morning consumption is a citrus-flavored product, of course.)
But if I ever wanted to win a straw poll in South Carolina, I’d put mustard in the barbecue sauce.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.