Video and transcribed excerpts after the jump, including Pawlenty’s concern about perceived “fraud or mischief” in the Senate election, the resolution of which he said “could take well into summer or longer.” 

Mike Barnicle, substituting for “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, asked the governor to respond to people who say, “There’s Pawlenty: He was against the stimulus package but he’s going to take the money. He’s a hypocrite.” Pawlenty defended Minnesota as a net contributor to the federal budget, but first parried on hypocrisy:

Where was that double standard when Democratic governors or liberal governors in the past said, “I’m against military spending but I’m going to take National Guard money” or “I’m against No Child Left Behind but I’m going to take education money” or “I’m against tax cuts but I’m not going to voice objection to my citizens receiving the benefits of those cuts or credits.” So let’s make sure we’re looking at that argument in its full glory.

Barnicle, apparently unaware how long Pawlenty’s been flying on no-tax auto-pilot, tried flattery …

You’re a good guy, you’re a bipartisan guy. I mean you’ve got the automatons in the House of Representatives, they stand up en masse and vote, not one Republican votes for the stimulus package.

… before pressing hard on why — “for the first time in history, from the time people went to war by throwing rocks at on another”  — Republicans under President Bush cut taxes while fighting two wars, running up the national debt. Pawlenty shot back by citing “recent history” that somehow doesn’t include the Clinton era:

It doesn’t matter it seems in recent history for most of the years, whether a Republican’s in the White House or a Democrat, or Republicans are in charge in the Congress or the Democrats, they have forgotten or let go of the goal and the importance of balancing the budget.

The weary world traveler looked more haggard than usual, seen against a wall of books rather than the standard Third Avenue Bridge-by-night Minneapolis backdrop that he and Sen. Amy Klobuchar used in their MSNBC appearances early in the week. (When will the new, blue-lit I-35W bridge make its cable TV news backdrop debut?)

Barnicle asked: “How does affect, if it does, or impact, if it does, the people of Minnesota, having only one United States senator?” Pawlenty’s reply, in part:

Well, it impacts us significantly because right now some of the big issues of our time are being decided in Washington, and having only one senator is a big disadvantage. So it’s very unfortunate, and it puts us at a disadvantage.

And yet he prefaced that by telling the national TV audience that:

We don’t want an outcome where people say there was fraud or mischief or some legal flaw.

How long will it take to make sure “people” don’t “say” such awful things? (My question, not Barnicle’s.)

If one side or the other decides to appeal the outcome to federal court, this could take well into summer or longer. It may be that one side or the other decides not to do that.

The interview ended on the topic of the Republican Party’s future, which some say Pawlenty embodies. He gave a hard supply-and-demand analysis to the party’s standing with the American voters:

In politics, we’re going to be the marketplace party? The marketplace is telling us they prefer the products and services of our competitors. And if we’re going to be a winning, growing, governing party, we need to be about including more people in, not throwing people overboard.

Which could explain his two appearances in one week on reputedly liberal MSNBC.

Here’s the video (MSNBC’s sometimes buggy video embed willing):

The first graph comes from the 1964 book Recount, by Ronald F. Stinnett and Charles H. Backstrom, an authoritative account of the legendarily close election two years earlier for governor of Minnesota. That contest ended — after 139 days of counting and recounting — with a 91-vote margin of victory for Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party challenger Karl Rolvaag over the Republican incumbent Elmer L. Andersen. But it started with an electoral see-saw of first thousands and then dozens of votes that saw the lead change six times in four days.

The graph is a snapshot of a little more than a day of that upheaval, from 9 p.m. election night until midnight the next day. Two lines show the size of the gap favoring first Rolvaag and then Andersen, as tracked by the rival news services United Press and The Associated Press, who were competing for the latest counts from counties across the state. At first, the lines rise sharply into territory indicating a Rolvaag plurality, then dive steeply down as press tallies indicated an Andersen lead, the first of a pattern of plurality shifts that continued for days after the time period depicted in the graph.

The second graph shows a different 28 hours in last week’s counting, based on tabulations courtesy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s Political Animal Twitter feed, from nearly 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, to past 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 7. Over that time, the vote margin favoring U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman dropped from 590 to 221 votes, with a few sudden jolts but no swings in the lead.

How the gap in the Minnesota gubernatorial vote count changed over 27 hours, Nov. 6–7, 1962, in thousands of votes. Lead for Rolvaag in the upper half of the graph, lead for Andersen in the lower half.

How the lead for U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman changed in the Minnesota senatorial vote count over 28 hours, Nov. 6–7, 2008, in hundreds of votes.