Of course, they weren’t really Palin’s purchases — and that’s another Minneapolis connection in the Times story. Jeff Larson, the locally-bred Republican consultant whose FLS Connect GOP phone-solicitation firm has been in the news again lately, fronted Palin the $130,000 for her clothes. (The Republican National Committee paid him back.)

The occasion for retelling the story of Palin’s Minneapolis shopping spree is her new book, in which Palin has her own version.

The Times interviews Lisa Kline, the designer who dressed Palin and the members of her family for the 2008 GOP convention. An excerpt:

Neiman Marcus opened for Ms. Kline and her assistant at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, she said, and the two split up and spent a rushed 90 minutes or so gathering what they needed. Ms. Palin and her family were not there; nor was anyone from the campaign. Instead, the two stylists relied on a couple of salesclerks and a store manager.

“There was no conversation. There was no chitchat. It was just, ‘We need two pairs of pants in size yadada,’ ” Ms. Kline said. The purchases were rung up, but Ms. Kline was not asked for payment of any kind.

“Apparently it had been prearranged,” she said. …

Ms. Kline said she does not recall who asked her to expand her styling to the entire Palin family or who set up the appointment at Neiman Marcus, which later became so controversial because it undermined the candidate’s image as a populist.

The Burberry brand that Palin favors has had a bad rap back in Britain as having become too populist:

During the 1970s, the brand became popular with the British football casual cult, leading to it to being associated with chavs, hooligans and members of football firms by the 1990s. The brand became something of a national joke, particularly when actress Danniella Westbrook was photographed with her young daughter wearing matching Burberry outfits. South Wales police ran a drive against anti-social behaviour under the name Operation Burberry and Burberry admitted that “Burberry is now synonymous with Chavs and thugs.”

Palin will make a return visit to Minnesota on her book tour, with a stop at the Mall of America on Dec. 7. (But don’t go there dressed like a chav in your Burberrys, or the security guards’ll be on you.)

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATE CAPITOL: House to file brief in unallotment suit. It’s a roundabout way to have their say in state’s budget after Gov. Pawlenty’s unilateral cuts. [MN Publius]

STATEWIDE: Norm Coleman is golden in guv-race poll. Smart Politics says told ya so, while candidates not named by pollster have a right to cry foul. [Politics in Minnesota; Smart Politics; Political Animal]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Scholars debate ID. The clash of ideas rang out as Minnesota’s P.Z. Myers pushed evolution and Ohio’s Jerry Bergman pushed back with intelligent design. [Minnesota Daily]

ROCHESTER: MnDOT hearts PRT. The state’s Department of Transportation hosts a symposium on personal rapid transit, the podcar system that’s been known to polarize people. [Associated Press]

MOOSE LAKE: Superintendent files suit over abuse as teen. His community houses sex offenders, now he alleges abuse at the hands of one, at a Catholic church retreat. [Star Tribune]

AVON: Trailers ‘untenable.’ A manufactured home park’s travails highlights the scarcity of low rents in rural areas. [Minnesota Public Radio]

The reason Palin talks like a Minnesotan — to the extent that she does — is that the part of Alaska where she grew up was populated by a 1935 migration of people from the Upper Midwest. Of more than 200 families who moved north from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, the largest number (15) came from Minnesota’s St. Louis County.

The researchers from Madison compared Palin’s speech during the vice presidential debate last year to speech they sampled from two native Minnesotans: a man born in Austin in 1977 and a woman born in Minneapolis in 1978.

With some words, like “boat,” the male sounded “hyper-Minnesotan, whereas the female Minnesotan has a BOAT vowel closer to Sarah Palin’s.”

Yet for all the commonalities, the paper says, ”Sarah Palin’s dialect lacks certain features of contemporary Upper Midwestern English.”

On the one hand, there’s no mistaking a certain “Fargo” twang:

Palin shows clearly identifiable Upper Midwestern features in her discourse markers (you betcha, etc.) and in her phonology (‘final devoicing’ and some particulars of her vowel space).

Yet in Palin’s way of speaking, what seems Minnesotan may not be.

Perceptually, the ostensibly Upper Midwest features outweigh the Western features, even though they are not necessarily categorical or even high-frequency patterns (like final devoicing), nor identical to patterns found among speakers in Wisconsin or Minnesota today (vowel acoustics.)

Here are a few other tidbits from “Defining Dialect, Perceiving Dialect, and New Dialect Formation: Sarah Palin’s Speech” (pdf), which appears in the December issue of The Journal of English Linguistics.

Palin is 20 times more likely to say “heck” and 46 times more likely to say “darn” than the average English speaker.

With regards to “her ‘g-dropping’ [goin', takin', hurtin'],” the researchers say, “the impression left may be of pervasive use, but it is both limited and systematic.”

The paper features a diagram showing the precise sounds Palin’s mouth makes when she says the word “pack,” as in “Joe Six Pack” (remember him?).

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: That’s our gal. The proportion of voters who don’t approve of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is greater in her own district than statewide … so she should run against U.S. Sen. Al Franken in 2014. [Smart Politics]

MINNEAPOLIS: People who voted like instant-runoff voting. Somehow pollsters found 504 of them to ask. [Minnesota Public Radio]

STATE CAPITOL: State IT pros support Gov. Pawlenty. An audit says the guy who online outdoorsmen call a “slob hunter” didn’t track his office’s computer-support expenses either. [Associated Press; Star Tribune]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: U2 at TCF in June. Bono will talk to Bill Cooper about debt relief. [Star Tribune; City Pages]

MAPLEWOOD: Al Franken visits City Hall. It’s safe to go to Maplewood again. On a Sunday, anyway. [John Nephew]

ST. PAUL: Heckuva job, Goldie. The feds say the Gopher State did good after I-35W fell down. [Minnesota Public Radio]

“You look at Sarah Palin and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann,” she told King. “They are relentlessly torn down by the liberal media. I mean, they’re wonderful women, they’re intelligent, they’re great mothers. They’re brilliant. And yet there’s a double standard that conservative women are fair game to be attacked and it’s not right and it needs to stop.”

King replied, “Doesn’t the conservative media tear down liberal policiticans?”

“Not to the extent that liberals do to conservative women,” she answered. “I think they get away with it.”

But what really ruffled Prejean’s feathers was King’s question about why she agreed to settle lawsuits with the Miss California USA pageant. The pageant sued her for breach of contract and Prejean, whose answer to a Miss USA pageant question that revealed her to be ardently anti-gay marriage endeared her to rightwing conservatives, countersued. On Nov. 3, all suits were dropped; CNN had reported that a source claimed the reason for the settlement was that “extremely graphic” videos involving Prejean has surfaced. When King prodded Prejean about the reason behind the settlement, she repeatedly called his line of questioning “inappropriate” and attempted to walk off the set.

Talk of Palin in the White House opened the door for media discussion of Bachmann’s own presidential prospects, which otherwise might’ve seemed far-out.

In March, she disavowed interest in becoming leader of the free world, but a Fox News profile at the time envisioned her in the governor’s mansion or the U.S. Senate.

Then in August, World Net Daily asked Bachmann if she would “one day run for the presidency.” Her reply:

If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it. When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard.

In September, she told conservative radio host Mike Gallagher:

Also with women politicians, they want to make sure no women, no woman becomes president before a Democrat woman, and so they’re doing everything they can to, I think, sabotage women like Sarah Palin, perhaps women like myself, or similarly situated women, to make sure that we don’t have a prominent national voice.

CNN’s story today, days after her high-profile rally on the U.S. Capitol steps, relies on that statement from September to answer (in part) the question posed in its headline. But she doesn’t need to say it anymore because, as CNN tells it:

The overall scope of the outreach effort is unusual for a second-term member and has sparked speculation that Bachmann could be laying the foundation for higher office.

But Bachmann’s effort to stay in her current post will be one of the top 10 races (of any kind) to watch in 2010, according a new listing by Politico, where yesterday she drew mention as an exception to “The GOP’s women problem.”

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.

Ambinder notes that the Republican base has grown more stridently conservative since 2000, and that rightward drift will only continue leading up to the 2012 primaries, given that there’s a liberal Democrat in the White House. While Pawlenty’s conservative bona fides are pretty solid — anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-taxes, etc. — he may not be sufficiently strident to appease the GOP ground troops. T-Paw, Ambinder notes, used to support climate-change legislation — a position anathema to many of the party faithful:

The point is that Pawlenty is going to have to make some adjustments. It’s not enough that he checks most of the boxes; he’s going to have to check more than most. His instinct is not to demagogue pro-choicers, or gays, or even liberals, but that instinct will be tested as he faces pressure to prove himself acceptable to the guardians of GOP orthodoxy in Iowa.

The standard strategy for Republican presidential candidates is this: Run to the right in the primaries, but not too far to the right; run to the center in the general election. This strategy assumes that general election voters don’t pay attention to the primaries. In today’s technological and political environment, that’s no longer true. The moment Pawlenty sets himself down in Iowa is the moment that the national default opinion of him will begin to be formed. If he stretches too far to the right, he won’t be able to stretch back to the center. There is little give. There is too much tension.

But if Ambinder’s analysis is correct, it would seem to beg a question: Can Pawlenty compete anywhere?

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.