Pawlenty mulls third term; history shows he twice backed term limits

The Republican ticket of Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau has twice emerged from three-way races victorious by plurality. Now Pawlenty is thinking about seeking a third term in 2010. If he goes for it, he’ll have a past failure to thank for the opportunity: In the 1990s, he and Molnau sought to enshrine term limits on governors and lieutenant governors in the Minnesota Constitution.

DFL blogger Dusty Trice began digging into Pawlenty’s term-limit past last week with a succession of posts that revealed increasingly ironic nuggets of legislative history. After the term-limits bill Pawlenty and Molnau co-authored in 1993 wasn’t successful, T-Paw authored a new bill two years later, pushing the idea to the point of making the term limits retroactive.

The conservative NationalReview.com blogs that 1995 was a long time ago: “A lot can change in 14 years, including a guy’s mind.”

But for the Tim Pawlenty and Carol Molnau of today — who stuck together even as the I-35W bridge collapse cost Molnau her moonlighting gig as commissioner of transportation — their long-buried legislative waste could prove radioactive.

Pawlenty had intended a 2002 run for U.S. Senate (where limiting terms is far beyond the reach of any state legislator). But heavy hands in the White House prodded Pawlenty into the governor’s race so that St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, a Republican convert, could challenge the sitting two-term Democratic senator who had once pledged to quit after 12 years.

If Paul Wellstone were still with us, Pawlenty could ask him how tough it is to run against your own words on limited terms in office.