ABC News has a rundown of possible GOP contenders for 2012 that puts Pawlenty’s cons entirely in terms of Mitt Romney:

Con: Pawlenty’s weakness is that he does not enjoy Romney’s personal wealth and he is overshadowed by Palin’s star power. He also came under scrutiny last year when Dan Balz of the Washington Post characterized his moves to the right as being “Romneyesque.”

At Politics in Minnesota, Steve Perry ruminates on how long of a shadow T-Paw’s Minnesota shortcomings might cast over his White House hopes. If “lantern-jawed rich kid” Romney falls short as a Republican leading light, Perry writes, that could leave only Sarah Palin and these three very local things between T-Paw and the GOP nod:

The unallotment lawsuit. Pawlenty’s High Noon move to balance the budget by cutting $2.7 billion on his own has been provisionally upended by a judge’s ruling … And that could mean the mother of all balance-sheet nightmares …

Short-term borrowing. Minnesota Management and Budget (MMB) officials have been warning for a couple of months that the state could have to borrow to keep the general fund’s cash flow in the black … If the state’s credit took a hit on Pawlenty’s watch, or while his chair is still warm, it would go a long way toward unwinding his role as the national GOP’s poster boy for jeremiads about the federal budget.

The school shift. …[Pawlenty] has to maintain his reputation for putting a premium on K-12 education. This is why the governor needs the 2010 Legislature to codify the ad hoc $1.8 billion “payment shift” he cobbled together … Otherwise schools take a very public whacking and Pawlenty’s resume is tarnished as a result.

The site will mix aggregation with original reporting, much of it done by freelancers, Carlson told David Weigel of the Washington Independent, sister site of the Minnesota Independent:

If there’s a story whose facts are verifiable, and it generates interest, and it comes from Satan himself, I will take it and I will pay him a reporting fee. But if we take a piece from Satan, that does not mean we’re on board with Satan’s agenda. It just means that the provenance of the piece, the origins of the piece, is not the most important thing. People don’t give you stuff because they love journalists. They give you that stuff because they’re pushing an agenda.

Pawlenty’s piece was apparently solicited especially for the website’s big splash today. Weigel writes that

Carlson and his staff are spending the final hours before the launch polishing off content that can break out of the gate — exclusive interviews, lists like the Top 15 Most Wasteful Stimulus Projects, and short features from think tankers and established politicos. Arianna Huffington will have one of the first pieces on the site.

Pawlenty appears directly below a “welcome note” by Huffington in the “Featured” column — and directly above the first installment of a diary by conservative columnist S.E. Cupp, who said last month that Pawlenty “can’t just sort of sit back and be a quiet governor much longer if he really wants to compete in 2012.”

Another post, labeled “DC Exclusive,” is decidedly T-Paw-friendly: “Massachusetts health program, model for Obama’s reform, strains state budget.” Dissing presidential rival Mitt Romney’s home state health plan was the theme of an op-ed Pawlenty wrote for the Washington Post back in August.

The interview, a Q&A with Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, finds the governor in a frank mood. Pawlenty waxes realistic about the political landscape:

We’ve gotten our butts kicked in 2006 and 2008. And I think for good reason. You can’t say you are going to be fiscally disciplined and then go to Washington and spend like crazy. You can’t say, “We are against corruption and bad behavior,” and then engage in corruption and bad behavior! I mean, people aren’t stupid.

Creationism comes up:

NEWSWEEK: In her book, Palin claims that McCain’s handlers wanted her to be silent about her belief in creationism. How would you describe your view?

PAWLENTY: I can tell you how we handle it in Minnesota. We leave it to the local school districts. We don’t mandate a curriculum or an approach. We allow for something called “intelligent design” to be discussed as a comparative theory. It doesn’t have to be in science class.

NEWSWEEK: Where are you personally?

PAWLENTY: Well, you know I’m an evangelical Christian. I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn’t say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman. But there are a lot of theologians who say that the ideas of evolution and creationism aren’t necessarily inconsistent; that he could have “created” human beings over time.

[Via Polinaut]

From CNN’s transcript:

KING: The cost of the program has been one of the questions in Massachusetts. And among the critics is a man you might see on the campaign trail should you decide to run again in 2012, the Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty. Listen to this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAWLENTY: If you don’t also contain costs and preserve quality, you’re in big trouble. And the federal proposal is largely modeled so far after what happened in Massachusetts. They succeeded in extending access, but the cost of that program has now double, triple, and some would say soon to be quadruple what they originally estimated. That would be a bad development for those of us who are concerned about the uncontrollable rise in health care costs. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Does Governor Pawlenty have your plan right there?

ROMNEY: No, I’m afraid facts are stubborn things, and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation has taken a good look at the Massachusetts plan some three or four years after it was passed, and it is well within the original forecast. It’s about — a little over 1 percent of the state budget. And in fact, virtually all of our citizens are insured.

Romney continued: “And by the way, if other governors can come up with something better than I did, congratulations. We’ll copy one another.”

So, not a slashing attack on T-Paw by Romney, but neither did Romney’s comments show the kind of deference either man would expect as president, were he traveling abroad as Pawlenty was over the weekend.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, on the other hand, who is another GOP 2012 presidential prospect, showed solidarity with Pawlenty by giving out a phone sex number instead of a state toll-free number.

Pawlenty did something similar in September, mistakenly giving out a phone sex number instead of the call-in number for his weekly WCCO-AM radio talk show.

The newspaper asked residents of the nation’s first presidential caucus state how they viewed seven potential contenders for the 2012 GOP nomination. Only Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal inspired less feeling than Pawlenty, with 74 percent unsure how they felt about him.

None of the others’ home states are anywhere near as close geographically to Iowa as Pawlenty’s: Arkansas (Mike Huckabee), Alaska (Sarah Palin), Virginia (Newt Gingrich), Massachusetts (Mitt Romney) and New York (George Pataki).

Pawlenty began his cross-border courtship of Iowa Republicans earlier this month with a widely watched speech to the state’s party activists.

[Via Hot Dish Politics]

That criticism — that Pawlenty’s rightward veer could alienate him from moderates, as happened to Romney — has been leveled before, including two weeks ago by The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who applied the term “Romney-esque” to T-Paw, and early this month by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza.

On Friday, Cillizza released his latest round of rankings of GOP leaders, and Pawlenty has dropped from second to fourth. Accounting in part for the drop is Pawlenty’s involvement in New York’s special election in the 23rd congressional district, where Minnesota’s governor endorsed the candidate favored by Tea Party activists instead of the one the GOP officially backed. Cillizza writes, “[T]he governor must be careful to stay true to who he is rather than get caught up in the attempt to out-conservative the rest of the field.”

Via Secrets of the City.

In particular, Balz criticizes T-Paw for his awkward refusal to embrace Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe as a member in good standing of the GOP during a recent television appearance. He also dings Pawlenty for eagerly wading into the recent congressional contest in upstate New York and for criticizing President Obama’s address to students on the first day of school. The awkward attempt to reposition himself for a Republican primary reminds Balz of Mitt Romney’s (doomed) 2008 presidential campaign.

The real risk for Pawlenty, as Romney learned in his unsuccessful 2008 campaign, is losing his true voice and his authenticity. Romney spent so much time trying to reposition himself and picking narrow tactical fights with his rivals that the qualities that might have made him a more attractive candidate were lost in the smoke. But once a candidate starts down that road, it can be hard to pull back.

This year, Romney has generally kept a lower profile. The view among strategists is that Romney has been shrewd in staying out of these flare-ups and wise to try to focus on big-picture issues of national security and the economy when he raises his profile. Pawlenty, being less known nationally and looking to attract attention to himself, has been reluctant to stay quiet.

Last week, another Washington Post political reporter, Chris Cillizza, made similar criticisms of Pawlenty.

Pawlenty’s figures lagged well behind those of other potential GOP contenders. Mike Huckabee was deemed worthy of serious consideration by 71 percent of Republicans, while Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney were judged credible contenders by 65 percent of GOP respondents. Among all of those surveyed, just 25 percent deemed Pawlenty qualified to be president, while twice as many held the opposite view.

The Gallup survey polled 1,021 adults across the country. It had a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It’s the third recent poll to indicate that Pawlenty has considerable work to do if he intends to make a credible bid for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the top choice of roughly one third of Republicans for the presidential nomination in 2012, according to a new CNN poll. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was the second most popular choice, with support from 25 percent of Republican voters, while former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney drew backing from 21 percent of respondents. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty trailed well behind with support from just five percent of likely Republican voters.

The CNN results echo those of a poll conducted earlier this month by Rassmussen Reports, which found Pawlenty with support from four percent of those surveyed. Pawlenty has been criss-crossing the country and making frequent cable talk-show appearances while testing the waters for a potential 2012 presidential bid.

The CNN poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points for questions asked only of Republicans.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty

Should Gov. Tim Pawlenty skip the Iowa caucuses? Yes, it’s ridiculously early to be contemplating such questions about the 2012 presidential campaign. But The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder raises that question in a post today. He notes that only candidates with strong Christian conservative bona fides will have a chance in the caucuses, meaning that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are the prohibitive favorites (and Mitt the Mormon doesn’t have a chance in hell).

Ambinder essentially lumps Pawlenty in with Romney in weighing whether he should skip the caucuses and head straight to New Hampshire:

Pawlenty’s main strategic challenge would be New Hampshire — figuring out how to defeat the Romney machine there. It might not be hard; since there won’t be a Democratic primary, as many as 60,000 independents could decide to vote Republican. Appealing to these independents on economic issues — and comforting them on social issues — is the test.

But Ambinder might be underestimating Pawlenty’s appeal to Christian conservatives in Iowa. As noted in this piece by Andy Birkey, Pawlenty is an evangelical Christian and attends Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie. The pastor of Wooddale is Leith Anderson, who just happens to be the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. That organization represents 45,000 churches and roughly 30 million evangelical Christians across the country. Those ties, along with the fact that Pawlenty has served two terms as governor of a neighboring state, might make him a formidable opponent in the Iowa caucuses.