The Cipher

Thanks to John McCain, the Governor of Minnesota is the man of the moment, a new political brand. Yet even as the rest of the country gets acquainted with Tim Pawlenty, the people he's worked with for years are still struggling to undestand who he is - and what, exactly, he believes.

Photo by Mike McGregor

(page 2 of 4)

The Governor’s office

2007-2008

He’s the Governor of Brigadoon. That’s the way Margaret Anderson Kelliher, the speaker of the Minnesota House, sometimes thinks about Tim Pawlenty. Every so often, she’ll detect a figment of practicality—the shadow of a person she could do business with. “One moment you may think that’s materializing,” Kelliher says, “and then it can evaporate very quickly.”

Last August, she stands side by side with the governor on the Tenth Avenue Bridge, meditating on a tangle of metal in the water. It’s a Third World mess down there, the scene from an Air Force video of the bombing of Belgrade. And the crowds that keep vigil with their cell-phone cameras suggest a creeping anxiety about what’s happened—an uneasiness that a politician can’t afford to ignore.

“I think his instinct when he talked about being willing to be for some kind of gas tax was sincere,” Kelliher says today. “And then I think he listened to other people—or was forced to listen to other people—who said that wasn’t the best thing to do.” Minority leader Marty Seifert didn’t want it. Maybe Grover Norquist—national tax scourge and scrooge-ish Republican kingmaker—didn’t want it, Kelliher says.

Sitting in his city-hall office, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak echoes the House speaker’s memories about the days after the 35W collapse. And though he’s widely seen to be preparing his own 2010 gubernatorial bid, Rybak asserts that he’s genuinely befuddled by Pawlenty’s approach: “We’re trying to build a light-rail line along University between Minneapolis and St. Paul. And he asked several of us to personally sit on the implementation team, to make tough choices”— whether to jam the line down Washington Avenue, the main artery of the University of Minnesota, for example—“and we delivered. Then, out-of-the-blue, he vetoed the bill.”

Rybak can’t explain Pawlenty’s apparent reversals, other than to say: “After six years of working together, I can’t tell you anything other than that he doesn’t seem to be very engaged by what he’s doing.”

The mayor is not the only one wondering if the governor might be, of all things, bored. In March, MPR’s capitol reporter Tom Scheck tallied the number of times, between January 1 and March 12, that the governor traveled out of state. Scheck counted 25 partial or whole days. Many days the governor’s calendar read, “no public events scheduled”—a claim that was undermined when Pawlenty turned up on, say, Hannity & Colmes.

Who can blame him? At least the FOX show has Hannity, the conservative blunderbuss. Back in St. Paul, it’s a whole lot of Colmes. Since 2002—the year Pawlenty took office—the state GOP has lost 33 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate.

The governor doesn’t attribute these losses to his leadership or ideology.

“I think there are other things involved here as well,” Pawlenty says. “For example, the war is a big issue—and I’m a proponent of winning the war. That doesn’t necessarily equate with the Democrats’ agenda for single-payer health care, which I don’t like. President Bush had a pretty serious slide with the response to Katrina. That doesn’t directly relate to, you know, education reform. So there are things that I think are causing some of the shift that don’t translate to a mandate for liberal approaches to public policy.”

Such explanations give comfort to twitchy Republicans across the nation. For if Pawlenty’s rhetorical balm is working in Minnesota—at last check, his approval rating stood at 54 percent—maybe the Grand Old Party isn’t headed the way of the Whigs. “Sam’s Club” Republicanism is what Pawlenty calls it: a way to convince low-income workers that free markets are more than an imaginary friend.

Practically speaking, Pawlenty spends the 2008 session vetoing the DFL’s transportation bill and their minimum-wage proposal. He won’t sign the Democrats’ bonding bill, either. Senate majority leader Larry Pogemiller compares Pawlenty’s tactics to those of a “spoiled teenager.” “Having been overridden on the gas tax,” Pogemiller explains, the governor essentially declared: “I’m going to take my ball and go home.”

Even a staunch backer like U.S. senator and onetime boss Dave Durenberger sometimes questions whether the governor’s approach is reaping results. “I’ve had legacy discussions with him where I’d say he’s not going to be remembered for any one thing,” Durenberger says. “He’s going to be remembered for holding the office.”

Durenberger takes a half step back from that thought. The governor’s real passion, he believes, is for the issues. It can almost seem as if Pawlenty cares more about inventing ideas than achieving outcomes. And after all the governor’s mandatory face time with constituent groups—bison ranchers and Slovenian trade delegations—there aren’t enough hours in the week to tinker with everything. You’ve got to pick an issue or two, Durenberger declares, and stick with it. “Whether it’s 70 hours he works or 80 hours—he’s good at every one of those 70 hours,” he says. “He’s good at it all....The challenge for those of us who are his friends, who have watched him and know his potential, is we see so much more he could accomplish.”

Others, too, have begun to notice how the governor’s placid exterior masks a fidgety intellect. In December, in a quietly damning article in the Star Tribune, political reporter Patricia Lopez reviews the fleeting “gestures” and questionable achievements of the governor’s “idea-a-minute style.” There was his passing plan to tap Indian casino revenues, his fleeting push to restore the death penalty.

The restlessness isn’t limited to public policy. Forget about picking an issue or two; the guy can hardly pick a TV station. Mary Pawlenty describes a kind of seasickness that comes from sharing a couch with her spouse. ESPN, CMT, The Food Network—they blur past in a second. “It’s a little random,” Mary says. “But suffice it to say it’s not always the stuff I would stop on.”

Yet it’s this same frenetic energy that propels Pawlenty through the dozens of events that make up a governor’s daily schedule. Ask the governor what he did the day before and he’ll turn to his communications director with genuine curiosity: What did I do? On a random day in June, for example, Pawlenty meets with the Legislative Commission to End Poverty, interviews eight judicial candidates, records a videotape to celebrate local gospel singer Tom Tipton’s 75th birthday, greets a reception for the host committee of the Republican National Convention, and dines with the new archbishop. A man without Pawlenty’s motor would need amphetamines to get through a day like that.
 

It’s a paradox of the dizzyingly busy that the more they do, the more they seem to miss. Pawlenty—who is by every account a dutiful father to his two daughters Anna, 15, and Mara, 11—speaks with remorse about having missed Anna’s last volleyball tournament of the school year. And if you counted the missed suppers? Well, it would be easier to count the ones the governor makes. By Mary Pawlenty’s tally, the family manages to sit down together about twice a week. Breakfasts are better.

The First Lady accepts the hurried life. She can’t imagine what they’d do without it. “Are there moments I wish he would just be able to come home for dinner every night? Sure, there are times I think that would be terrific. And then he will come home on a Saturday morning, and I’ll think, this is wonderful. He has nothing on his schedule, a very rare occurrence. We have this whole Saturday before us! So we’ll get up and I’ll make a homemade pancake recipe. We have this great family breakfast and dishes are done. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and he’ll say”—her voice quavers uneasily—“Well, what’s the schedule? Well, we don’t really have a schedule today. Well what are we going to be doing? And he begins to get antsy because he needs to be doing something. And then I think, either time for a chore list for this man or time for him to go out and do something else.”

There is a bigger something else that looms in Pawlenty’s future, of course. Not the question of how to fill a Saturday, but how the governor will fill the next four years if he doesn’t take up residence in the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Mary, for one, can’t imagine her husband parked in the government-relations department of a stolid law firm. “He never has been, and never could be, wired to sit still at a desk and bill hours,” the First Lady says. “He would become a very unhappy person, very quickly.”

And right now—though the DFL may hardly believe it—Pawlenty is happy. Still happy. How many lawyers have a chance to create a new state park at Lake Vermilion? Or to introduce performance-based pay for Minnesota teachers? How many corporate lawyers will be praising Tom Tipton on his 75th birthday video? Maybe Pawlenty seized the opportunity to paraphrase one of his favorite Bible verses, Luke 12:48:
To whom much is given, much is expected.

“There’s nothing like being in the public sector,” says Charlie Weaver, the governor’s former chief of staff, who currently lobbies for the Minnesota Business Partnership. “Whether you’re the governor or a legislator or any kind of public service position, it’s all better than making money.” And if you don’t think the governor believes that, say his friends, you don’t know the first thing about him.