tpaw-cbs-stillA 24-hour news cycle has now passed since Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced that his future plans don’t include running for re-election. And if he hoped to gain a bit of the national news media’s attention, he got it.

His announcement registered with broadcast and print media across the country in headline roundups and news digests, but most analysis of note came via cable TV news networks and major newspapers’ Web sites. Their focus fell on his future as a national political figure, with some sidelong glances at his role in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman struggle for Minnesota’s second U.S. Senate seat.

On MSNBC, commentator Lawrence O’Donnell called Pawlenty ” the best player [Republicans] have,” to which Pat Buchanan (himself a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination) replied that while he’s “an attractive fellow” who is “doing the right thing” by not running for re-election, “[Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin will wipe the floor with him” in 2012.

On CNN, anchors Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty recalled Pawlenty as the 2008 VP also-ran who might have made the GOP ticket more competitive.

The Boston Globe’s Political Intelligence blog writes that a new CNN/Opinion Research poll shows T-Paw trailing badly in the early running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination to a man who’s already a former governor: Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. Indeed, Romney’s out-of-office success as a candidate has caught Pawlenty’s eye as an example, the New York Times’ The Caucus notes.

If he takes it, Pawlenty’s road to the White House would pass through Iowa, where the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Politics Insider says he has well-placed friends and admirers from several road trips he made on behalf of Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Pawlenty’s banquet-patter about building the party with Sam’s Club Republicans may get stale by 2012, warns the National Journal’s Hotline. He’ll have a chance to start refreshing his rhetoric this weekend in Washington, D.C. There, he’ll address not only the College Republicans‘ national convention, as he mentioned Tuesday, but also a gathering sponsored by the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA), according to Politico,

(RNLA fundraising for Norm Coleman’s post-election efforts to regain his Senate seat prompted a DFL Party complaint to the Federal Election Commission early this year. An RNLA “Stop Al Franken from Stealing the Election” Web page, with headline altered to “Stop ACORN,” still solicits donations of $5,000 — an amount exceeding legal limits, the DFL charged in its yet-unresolved complaint.)

The Washington Post’s The Fix pushed the Franken-Coleman angle the hardest, seeing Pawlenty’s “retirement” as a potential game-changer. The theory goes that with no worries about wooing Minnesota voters hungry for a second senator, Pawlenty might actually withhold an election certificate from Franken even after the Minnesota Supreme Court rules:

So, if Coleman decides he wants to take the case to the federal level if he were to lose at the state court level, there’s now a significantly higher likelihood that Pawlenty would be receptive to such a move.