Photo: The UpTake

Photo: The UpTake

Gov. Tim Pawlenty was at odds with his own communications office on a couple points at his press conference yesterday — including the topic of his talk.

Here’s how Pawlenty’s communications director, Brian McClung, billed the event:

Governor Pawlenty will hold a press conference today regarding his future plans.

Never mind that the phrase “future plans” is a notorious redundancy deserving of its own line-item veto. Pawlenty played off all questions on the topic like a rock star who refuses to perform the hit that the promoter promised:

I don’t know what my plans are. I don’t have any plan …

I do not know what my future plans are. I really don’t. …

I’ll just reiterate: I. Don’t. Know. What. My. Future. Plans. Are.

Then there was the answer that the governor’s office had to scramble to take back. Two hours after Pawlenty’s press conference ended, McClung issued this statement:

At today’s press conference, Governor Pawlenty misspoke when he said that our administration considers unallotments as permanent cuts to programs.  The Governor thought he was addressing a question regarding the impacts of line-item vetoes rather than unallotments.  While line-item vetoes are counted as permanent funding reductions, an unallotment only impacts funding for that specific biennium.  The reduction does not carry forward into future years.

Politics in Minnesota’s Steve Perry, who asked the question, wonders whether Pawlenty really thought he was talking about line-item vetoes. Here’s Perry’s transcription:

PIM: Regarding the question of unallotments, I know your administration has studied closely the House Research paper on unallotments, and it points to ambiguities in the law–one of which is that it’s not clear whether unalloting a sector of the budget reduces the base budget going forward. In your view, does it reduce the base budget, or is it a temporary reduction?

Pawlenty: You’re talking about in terms of the forecast beyond the current biennium? Well, I think it’s our position and the Department of Finance’s position that that’s a permanent reduction. But I’ll defer that to the Department of Finance.

Maybe Pawlenty did mix up line-item vetoes with unallotment, lost in the emotion of a moment that some media labeled his retirement from politics (though that seems a mislabeling, and the event was, as Pawlenty reminded reporters, “not a wake”).

But this is a man who ordinarily watches his words. He rarely, for example, flings “Democrat” as a partisan pejorative in place of the more proper adjective “Democratic.” So it was surprising to hear him at the press conference deliver this line in his fed-up, scolding tone:

We need leaders and visionaries and change-agents, not whiners and defenders of the status quo.

You’d think Pawlenty would have excised the word “whiner” from his vocab list last summer, after the man he nearly joined on the national Republican ticket, Sen. John McCain, dispatched former Sen. Phil Gramm from a campaign post for making comments about a “nation of whiners.”