Video and more after the jump.

“Stylistically, she’s got many, many strengths,” Pawlenty gushes. “Substantively, she’s got an executive leadership. There’s a confidence there that’s decisive, that I think is crisp.”

Echoing a logic of identity politics that Republicans have also advanced this week in Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District, Pawlenty pushes Palin’s personal interests and family experiences:

She’s somebody who can speak to people who are outdoors, people who’ve got disabled children, people who have members of the military, and more. She has a series of life experiences that when she speaks to people, people say, “You know, that’s kind of like me. That’s kind of my story.”

“But she’s not being asked to be local councilor,” protests SkyNews interviewer Jeremy Thompson. “She’s being asked to be vice president of the United States!”

At which point Pawlenty again cites Palin’s two years as governor, before conceding at one limitation in Palin’s portfolio.

“Does she have the deepest foreign policy experience? No-o-o-o,” volunteers the longtime McCain backer, who SkyNews bills as having been “heavily tipped” for the vice presidential slot himself — and who just wrapped up a five-day trade mission to Spain and England where he twice keynoted international gathering between meetings with ambassadors and top European foreign policy figures.

In the video, Pawlenty also discusses his feelings about getting passed over, and exactly when he heard the bad news: “Officially, as I was eating breakfast.”

Schecter’s new book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him — And Why Independents Shouldn’t, is the best of the handful of books published so far that take a critical look at the Republican presidential nominee’s record of unbridled ambition and political flip-floppery. Also the best-selling: In the first weeks after its release, it spent a considerable amount of time as one of Amazon’s 150 top sellers.

The Real McCain parses its subject’s 26-year career in the House and Senate and finds a record that is mostly straight-line GOP conservatism interrupted by a tack to the center early in the GWB administration when steering to Bush’s left appeared to be McCain’s best shot at the White House.

I spoke to Schecter Wednesday afternoon in a 20-minute discussion that ranged from McCain’s hair-trigger temper and his love affair with the media to his career-calibrated reversals on the Iraq War, Bush tax cuts, and abortion.

Listen: Author Cliff Schecter on The Real McCain (22:19)

Below the jump, excerpts of Schecter’s remarks.

Continued: Click “Read More”Why conservatives dislike McCain:

“It’s his moralizing. Really, what it comes down to is that whatever side of an issue he happens to be on, if you disagree with him, you’re not only someone who needs to be convinced. You’re treacherous, you’re dishonest, your motives are questioned, you’re immoral. People on the right and the left have been on the other side of this. He’s called people who opposed his campaign finance bill, whether they were doing it for good reasons or not, he called them corrupt. Many of those people were on the right. Now, those people who disagree with his fantasy plan for Iraq are accused of being traitors and waving the white flag. Even though his record has been very conservative overall, although he’s gone through periods of moderation when it suited him politically, in the end that anger is all sides. You’re either with him or against him, to use an old phrase.”

“He hasn’t broken with [conservatives] any more than a whole host of people on the right who they still accept and like. In the end, it’s really the attitude. He’s such a pugilist that when he disagrees with you, he has to destroy you. That doesn’t play well, really, on any side.”

On McCain’s temper:

“No I don’t [think McCain can get through a general campaign without temper tantrums]. But we have this filter of the media. If he does it somewhere in a very public place, where enough people can see it, perhaps it will severely damage him. But I broke a story in my book that he had physically assaulted Rick Renzi, a congressman from Arizona, in 2006. The response to that story was that the McCain people called me a liar and he denied it when he was asked on Fox News if it ever occurred. Suddenly, a week later, when the Washington Post got more information on it and wrote a story on John McCain’s temper, now they’ve backed up a bit and admitted, ‘Oh, wait, it did happen, but it wasn’t as bad as Cliff said it was.’

“It’s an explosive temper that he cannot control. It’s also led him to try and in some cases succeed in getting numerous people who had the audacity to disagree with him fired from their jobs. For those of us who lived through the Bush years and saw the way that those who were ‘disloyal’ were purged and smeared and attacked, that’s what you’re looking at in John McCain. But I would say even worse. His temper seems to be much worse than the petulance we get from George W. Bush. That’s a long way of saying I think he’s going to blow up a number of times. He already did once with a reporter. The question is, will it be reported accurately?”

On McCain’s abortive efforts to leave the Republican party:

“The first major [overture to the Democrats] he made was in 2001, around the time that Jim Jeffords ended up switching, the senator from Vermont. In fact, it’s been reported now that John McCain approached the Democrats before Jeffords did. You had a tie in the Senate, so one vote was enough to change the balance of power. John McCain was still very angry at the way he’d been treated by George W. Bush and Karl Rove, and I would say rightfully so, during the primaries, when the smear campaign against him was quite unbelievable. He had serious thoughts at that time about switching to the Democratic party. The Democratic party was in a place where I think his views on some issues, like trade and others, wouldn’t be quite as unpopular as they are now, and he was trying to moderate them.

“But again, the question has to be asked, why was he trying to moderate them? I argue that he was doing it, and I’ve been told this by a number of top-level Republican officials, that it was all out of anger for Bush and out of political ambition. He thought he was going to switch to the Democratic party first. Then when Jim Jeffords did, there wasn’t as much motivation for him. But what he did was to spend three years — and anybody can observe his record and see this — where his record was much more moderate than it was before 2000 and after about 2003, when he veered back to the hard right. The reason why he did this was because he’d been thinking about running as an independent. He’d been talking to many people and thinking he might leave the Republican party and run as an independent against George Bush.

“The second [episode] with joining the Democratic party was when he himself approached John Kerry — again, not accurately reported at the time, when it was said that Kerry approached him; not true, according to John Kerry and others. John McCain approached Kerry and spoke to him about potentially being his vice-president and having there be a unity ticket against Bush. Nobody knows exactly what was said, but it scared the heck out of Karl Rove and others enough that they went and told him they would throw everything behind him in 2008 and much of the infrastructure would support him. Which they did in the end. He still found a way to almost lose.

“So there you go. Anybody can easily see that when he was pushing for things like a patients’ bill of rights, and closing the gun-show loophole, having CAFE standards, and a number of other issues where he moved decidedly over to the center, it was during a brief time when he was thinking about leaving the Republican party and either becoming an independent or becoming a Democrat.”

That campaign has been a surprisingly strong but still uphill battle to secure the DFL endorsement over author and talk show host Al Franken and oppose incumbent U.S. Senator Norm Coleman in November. Nelson-Pallmeyer, a 56-year-old author of numerous books and a professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, has agreed to abide by the party’s endorsement (as has Franken), to be determined less than two months from now at the DFL convention in Rochester, June 6-8.

Nelson-Pallmeyer is certainly not racing to the center, although polls indicate that many of his positions, including withdrawal from Iraq (he has been a consistent opponent of the war) and a single-payer national health care system, have increasingly come to represent mainstream opinion.

“I am quite conservative fiscally, actually,” the candidate responds, when asked how he will rebut charges that he is a tax-and-spender who is soft on terrorism. “What outrages me is not the expenditure of taxes; taxes are what we need to invest in the future. What I am outraged about is where our taxes are going. With one day [worth] of Iraq war spending, we could hire 9,300 teachers for a year. This country will squander more wealth on occupying Iraq this year than we will the entire road and highway budget of our country. I relish the opportunity to debate Norm Coleman on fiscal responsibility.”

In this wide-ranging interview, Nelson-Pallmeyer also argues for “a domestic Marshall Plan” to combat global warming, defends his lack of electoral experience and real-life background in preparing him for the Senate, praises Bob Dylan and the joys of swimming in Minnesota lakes. Asked who he regards among his spiritual mentors, he cites the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh and the Jesuit priests working in El Salvador who were murdered by U.S.-trained forces in 1989.

Listen: Britt Robson interviews Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer (24:00)

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Today, having moved from editor of the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader in the mid-1990s to editor of Washington, D.C., City Paper, to his current job as a blogger and media writer for the Times, he still reads his morning paper that way. But his family, as he notes in that essay, doesn’t: His kids are checking text-messages, Facebook, or the mail for Netflix arrivals, while his wife heads to work with iPod earbuds in place.

In Minneapolis this week, Carr witnessed the local impact of this technological shift away from the “paper artifacts” he grew up reading. He covered the protest Thursday by Star Tribune employees facing buyouts and reassignments. And he characterized the legal feud sparked by Par Ridder’s jump from publisher of the Pioneer Press to the top job at the Star Tribune as a distraction for companies that should be battling to stay alive: it’s as if, he wrote, “two men, hanging off the cliff by the fingernails of one hand, decided to have a knife fight with the other hand.”

Before he gave the keynote at the Society of Professional Journalists Page One Awards banquet Tuesday night, Carr spent a few minutes with Minnesota Monitor discussing how such shifts are affecting the Twin Cities. He weighed in on local media players, including former City Pages editor Steve Perry (praiseworthy as an editor, less so as an individual) and Nancy Barnes, the Star Tribune editor who seems “plenty sincere,” but finds herself “playing out of George Orwell’s playbook” in spinning newsroom cuts as a “renewed focus.” And, in considering the Times’ successes, Carr offered a bit of advice for managers who are pondering deeper cuts at area papers.

“I don;t think that staffing appropriately to come up with compelling content is a luxury,” he said. “I think it’s a necessity. I don’t think you can cut your way to excellence or cut your way to viability.”

Read the interview. As a former Twin Cities resident and editor who’s now a New York Times media columnist, you have an interesting insider/outsider vantage point. With what’s gone on here with Village Voice Media and City Pages, the Pioneer Press lawsuit and the layoffs that preceded it, and the Star Tribune’s restructuring, what does it look like from where you sit?

I picked up a copy of City Pages this week as I always do, and compared to other alternatives, it’s a really good paper. I still have hurt feelings about City Pages eventually running the Twin Cities Reader out of business. I wasn’t here but I still felt it. …I’ve never much liked [former editor Steve Perry] or his approach. But I think as an editor, he really had few peers, in his ability to attract and sustain really, really great writers.

People like to talk about his superciliousness or his politics. The test is on the page. For years I’ve been coming back and seeing that paper, and I see papers all over the country. It’s a great paper. Or has been. And the idea that Village Voice Media didn’t have worse problems on their hands, I think is a joke. When you’ve got people like Britt Robson, Dave Schimke, Terri Sutton. Come on! Those are super-talented people.

Some say the New Times purchase of the Village Voice chain will lead to a more libertarian and less liberal — or perhaps more apolitical — kind of writing.

I share politics, probably, with Steve Perry, but I share newspaper approaches with [Village Voice Media]. I’ve always been, at both the Twin Cities Reader and at City Paper, equal opportunity in terms of choosing opponents and choosing targets. I’ve felt my job is to hold up a rigorous and true mirror that allows readers to make their own judgments. So I don’t know if that makes me a libertarian. I think it makes me a newspaperman.

I never wanted to work on an op-ed page. The other thing: [Village Voice Media] papers in general are far superior to most weeklies, and they fund great journalism, pay a living wage, pay healthcare. So many times the weeklies talk about how bad the dailies are, and I always think to myself: “Have you looked at your own paper lately? This thing sucks!”

What about the metro dailies? The lawsuit, the downsizing plans at the Star Tribune? What does that look like from your office at the New York Times?

I’m a person who grew up reading both those papers. My heroes worked at both those papers.

Who were some of those heroes?

I watched Eric Black, Tom Hamburger, Stormi Greener, Dane Smith at both papers, and I mean not just to restrict it to them. Local journalism in general was great: Eric Eskola [of WCCO and TPT], Pat Kessler [at WCCO], you name it. These people were giants to me. So, to watch papers