Pawlenty on ‘Hardball’: I’ll chow down at stimulus plan’s ‘meandering buffet’

MSNBC must stand for Minnesotans Speak Nightly By Cable. For the fourth straight night, the TV news channel carried a segment featuring a prominent elected official from the state. Thursday it was again Gov. Tim Pawlenty, this time on “Hardball” representing Republican governors who opposed the federal stimulus bill but will accept the money (a few are making noises about refusing it). T-Paw vowed Minnesota won’t be shy about taking nourishment from what he called the spending plan’s “meandering buffet” that “does not focus on bread-and-butter things like tax cuts.”

Video and transcribed excerpts after the jump, including Pawlenty’s concern about perceived “fraud or mischief” in the Senate election, the resolution of which he said “could take well into summer or longer.” 

Mike Barnicle, substituting for “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, asked the governor to respond to people who say, “There’s Pawlenty: He was against the stimulus package but he’s going to take the money. He’s a hypocrite.” Pawlenty defended Minnesota as a net contributor to the federal budget, but first parried on hypocrisy:

Where was that double standard when Democratic governors or liberal governors in the past said, “I’m against military spending but I’m going to take National Guard money” or “I’m against No Child Left Behind but I’m going to take education money” or “I’m against tax cuts but I’m not going to voice objection to my citizens receiving the benefits of those cuts or credits.” So let’s make sure we’re looking at that argument in its full glory.

Barnicle, apparently unaware how long Pawlenty’s been flying on no-tax auto-pilot, tried flattery …

You’re a good guy, you’re a bipartisan guy. I mean you’ve got the automatons in the House of Representatives, they stand up en masse and vote, not one Republican votes for the stimulus package.

… before pressing hard on why — “for the first time in history, from the time people went to war by throwing rocks at on another”  — Republicans under President Bush cut taxes while fighting two wars, running up the national debt. Pawlenty shot back by citing “recent history” that somehow doesn’t include the Clinton era:

It doesn’t matter it seems in recent history for most of the years, whether a Republican’s in the White House or a Democrat, or Republicans are in charge in the Congress or the Democrats, they have forgotten or let go of the goal and the importance of balancing the budget.

The weary world traveler looked more haggard than usual, seen against a wall of books rather than the standard Third Avenue Bridge-by-night Minneapolis backdrop that he and Sen. Amy Klobuchar used in their MSNBC appearances early in the week. (When will the new, blue-lit I-35W bridge make its cable TV news backdrop debut?)

Barnicle asked: “How does affect, if it does, or impact, if it does, the people of Minnesota, having only one United States senator?” Pawlenty’s reply, in part:

Well, it impacts us significantly because right now some of the big issues of our time are being decided in Washington, and having only one senator is a big disadvantage. So it’s very unfortunate, and it puts us at a disadvantage.

And yet he prefaced that by telling the national TV audience that:

We don’t want an outcome where people say there was fraud or mischief or some legal flaw.

How long will it take to make sure “people” don’t “say” such awful things? (My question, not Barnicle’s.)

If one side or the other decides to appeal the outcome to federal court, this could take well into summer or longer. It may be that one side or the other decides not to do that.

The interview ended on the topic of the Republican Party’s future, which some say Pawlenty embodies. He gave a hard supply-and-demand analysis to the party’s standing with the American voters:

In politics, we’re going to be the marketplace party? The marketplace is telling us they prefer the products and services of our competitors. And if we’re going to be a winning, growing, governing party, we need to be about including more people in, not throwing people overboard.

Which could explain his two appearances in one week on reputedly liberal MSNBC.

Here’s the video (MSNBC’s sometimes buggy video embed willing):