Photo: wdcpix.com

Photo: wdcpix.com

The ranks of GOP presidential rivals who poll higher than Gov. Tim Pawlenty may soon thin if doomsayers are correct about Mike Huckabee’s future. Pundits (and Republicans) say the former Arkansas governor is on the ropes for having granted clemency to the suspect (now dead) in Sunday’s Washington State cop-killing. Meanwhile, tea-leaf readers say a significant co-sponsorship of Pawlenty’s Dec. 16 speaking event in New Hampshire bodes well for his Granite State support.

By saying he wouldn’t have offered clemency in the Arkansas case (and never has, in Minnesota), Pawlenty didn’t spare Huckabee during an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio program Monday.

On the show, T-Paw also shrugged off his sub-Huckabee showing in a Washington Post survey of support for likely GOP 2012 candidates. ”Nobody really knows who I am. That doesn’t surprise me or concern me,” said Pawlenty, making sure to plug his political action committee, Freedom First, by its internet address: timpawlenty.com.

Having scored political points back home by removing 52-inch flat-screen TVs from a state facility where sex offenders who have served their sentences remain confined, Pawlenty applied a TV analogy to the national health-care debate that again centered on screen size:

Laura, if I said to you or your listeners, please go home on your way home tonight from work, buy any television set that you want, any size, any features, any cost, don’t even look at the price, just send me and Mary Pawlenty the bill at the governor’s residence in Minnesota and we’ll pay for it, I mean, how many of your listeners would show up with a 12-inch black-and-white?

In New Hampshire, former U.S. Rep. Jeb Bradley has signed on (along with eight other Republicans in the state Senate) as a co-host for a $500-per-person event that Pawlenty is headlining to benefit the state’s Republican Senate Majority Committee.

Bradley told CQ Politics it’s not an endorsement, although “We’re thrilled he’s willing to give up his time to visit our state.”

RedHampshire.com casts a skeptical eye, asking, “Does this visit count towards the traditional ‘I need to meet him 3 times before I support him?‘”