Pawlenty is in line with conventional conservative wisdom on that, but out of step with one of the state’s leading experts on Iran. University of Minnesota anthropology Prof. William Beemon told Minnesota Public Radio this week there’s no evidence that Iran is trying to manufacture nuclear arms.

As for the governor’s sudden interest in pronouncing the names of foreign leaders correctly … who could have been prodding Pawlenty on that? Maybe it was some the new advisors for his Freedom First PAC who don’t want to see their presidential hopeful repeat the pronunciation struggles of their old bosses, President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Pawlenty, who keeps his passport current with international hobnobbing, corrected sidekick Brian McClung’s pronunciation of the Iran leader’s name.

But, as sometimes happens, the governor was also slightly off his upbeat game, offering a couple unhelpful interjections during the show’s opening patter about football rivalries with Wisconsin. McClung suggested Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle might “defect” and move to Minnesota.

McClung: He’s not running for another term.

Pawlenty: Neither am I.

McClung then tried to defend Minnesota against a Doyle jab (”We’re all intrigued by what ‘Minnesota beer’ might be,” Doyle said, a comment Pawlenty termed “fairly snarky”):

McClung: Minnesota is one of the great brewing states in the country.

Pawlenty: Was.

Pawlenty maintained his three-week streak of trashing (but not naming) Republicans who participated in a budget summit that the governor boycotted last month. Again he used his radio platform (now secure from DFL balance) to attack former House Speaker David Jennings, also a former Minneapolis school superintendent. When enrollment declined in Minneapolis several years ago, Pawlenty said, “leadership in the district at that time didn’t act very boldly.”

Iran 2009, Florida 2000. Photos: Flickr, Salon

In the biggest parallel yet to Minnesota’s still-disputed Al Franken-Norm Coleman election for U.S. Senate, Iran’s Guardian Council has now proposed to calm presidential-election protests with a partial recount. “We are ready to recount those boxes that presidential candidates claim to have been doctored,” a spokesman said. 

“It is possible that there may be some changes in the tally after the recount,” Guardian Council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai added. (Though not always the changes you want, Norm Coleman might caution.)

Actually a partial recount sounds more like Florida’s 2000 presidential election than Minnesota’s 2008–2009 exercise. Florida’s recount proceeded only in certain counties; that is, until it was stopped by the United States’ Guardian Council — er, Supreme Court. That contrasts with Minnesota, where state law mandates a statewide recount by hand when results show a margin smaller than half a percentage point between leading candidates.

Another thing Minnesota hasn’t seen that Florida and especially Iran have: riots. Peaceful demonstrations too, but Iran’s early protests were marred by violence (particularly on the authorities’ part, with fatal results), and Florida had its famous Brooks Brothers riot, in which young people with Republican ties stormed the Miami-Dade County recount offices. (The U.S. Supreme Court’s five-member majority used that instance of organized disorder as one reason for ruling Florida’s recount stopped.)

And here is another difference between Minnesota and Iran, should Iranian authorities proceed with even limited recounting: Minnesota law says ballots must be judged invalid if voters leave any kind of mark — initialing a correction, for instance — that could reveal their identity. In Iran, ballots aren’t valid unless voters leave the ultimate identity mark: their fingerprints (BBC video).

But contested election results have some commonalities, wherever they occur. It’s a small recount world, or as Minnesota-born columnist and author Thomas Friedman might say, the recount world is flat:

“Strange things keep happening in Minnesota … more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote.” [Wall Street Journal]

Mr. Moussavi’s representative, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour … gave an example: votes cast at some polling places, he said, exceeded the number of eligible voters in those areas. [New York Times]

Photos: WDCpix

Absentee voters complaining their ballots went uncounted. Charges of ballots disappearing in the rear of a vehicle. Suspicions that the top election official skewed the system to benefit his favorite. Minnesota’s senate contest? Sure. But over the weekend, gripes long familiar to observers of the Coleman-Franken fracas got a fresh airing in Iran’s disputed presidential election.

Thousands of Iranians outside of the country voted by absentee ballot and were not confident their votes were counted, and that issue has also been a worry for supporters of both Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman during their six-month election dispute.

The disproven claim that Minneapolis election officials carelessly or corruptly kept ballots in a car trunk had an echo in one of the Twitter messages emanating from inside Iran during the early hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner over Hossein Moussavi in Iran. ”My Father has a truck load of ballot boxes that were to be burned in the back of his truck,” wrote Raymond Jahan, who has the unequivocal Twitter handle StopAhmadi.

In both elections, critics threw a harsh light on the possibility that partisan politics had twisted the administrative efforts of the top  election officials: Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, and Iran’s Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli, a top aide who answers directly to Ahmadinejad.

Then there is the chameleon character of one player in each drama. Coleman ran against his former Democratic Party to gain the Senate seat that’s still in dispute. Moussavi was a prime minister allied with Iran’s revolutionary hard-liners in the 1980s now running as a reformer.