Pawlenty mingles populism and fiscal bonafides in Iowa stump

By Jon Collins
Monday, August 02, 2010 at 12:51 pm

Tim_Pawlenty_speaking,_Dec_29,_2007, from Wikimedia

In Iowa this weekend for the start of what the New York Times called the “Pawlenty road show,” Gov. Tim Pawlenty shrugged off questions about a presidential run with a wink and gathered jeers and accolades from the punditry. From a rustic barn, where he made his opening, to a country club, the Minnesota governor mingled midwestern modesty and fiscal conservatism with populist rhetoric.

The New York Times joined Pawlenty outside a red and white barn backed by a cornfield as he opened the weekend. Pawlenty has visited Iowa five times in less than a year, and has begun gathering powerful political operatives around him, including Sara Taylor Fagen, a White House political director for President George W. Bush. In this appearance, he stuck largely to fiscal concerns.

“Watch the behavior of people at an open bar versus a cash bar. It is very different. That’s all you need to know about government. If you have an open bar, you’re going to have one set of behaviors, and we’ve got to get back — at least partially — to a cash bar.”
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“It’s pretty tough to be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken. It doesn’t work so well.”

Pawlenty said that the Republican Party needs to cast off the stereotype that they’re the party of country clubs and board rooms. He later spoke Saturday morning at the Dubuque Country Club, where he played up his blue- collar heritage as the son of a truck driver and shined his populist rhetoric.

“Each time government, whether it’s through taxation, regulation or intervention into the marketplace, forcibly takes … one more piece of (a citizen’s) ability to have freedom to invest, freedom to invent, freedom to innovate, freedom to take risk, they are taking one more piece of that American dream, of human spirit, away. [...] “Patriots who see it, who understand the corrosive effects of that chipping away of the pillars of our country, need to rise up and say, ‘enough.’”

In Western Iowa at a $50 per plate chicken and coleslaw fundraiser, Pawlenty noted that “Wall Street gets a bailout, the poor understandably gets a handout, and all the rest of us put our hand out.”

While speaking to the Des Moine Register, Pawlenty took credit for the fact that Minnesota’s unemployment rate is only 6.8 percent, rather than the 10 percent nationwide rate. .

“I think Minnesotans and Iowans and others in certain parts of the Midwest have been more fortunate economically and have a little stronger base for their optimism than in other parts of the country.”

Pawlenty also took some shots at national issues, blaming Pres. Barack Obama for the recession, by pointing to increased “business regulations” and “taxes.”

“But I’m concerned that this may plateau or we might even double-dip because the policies and the direction that the president has led us toward is wrong for what I know to be the things that make the private economy want to grow and expand.”

According to the Muscatine Journal:

“When you’re dealing with bullies, they respect strength. They don’t respect weakness,” Pawlenty said of national military policy. He said the President was correct in sending troops to Afghanistan, but it took him five months to make the decision, and he’s talking about removing them next summer. “What message does that send to those who want to stand with us?”