Posted on 08/14/2011 10:19:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Tim Pawlenty is exiting the race for the White House the same way he came in — on a tidal wave of conventional wisdom.
He was too even-tempered, they say, to catch on with a white-hot electorate. He was too level-headed, they say, to connect with a grassroots that’s gone to extremes. He was a nice guy — “boring,” in the parlance of our times — so he finished last.
Breaking news: The conventional wisdom is wrong. Pawlenty’s personality problem wasn’t a charisma deficit — it was a wimpiness surplus.
But the wimp factor is meaningless relative to the flaw that doomed his candidacy. As Ron Paul has amply proven, a certain kind of message can propel even the most unlikely of messengers deep into a crowded field.
Pawlenty is out, and out first, for one reason and one reason only.
It’s not Pawlenty. It’s Pawlentyism.
Tim Pawlenty is the canary in the establishment coal mine. His message — that the Republican Party doesn’t need to rethink any of its main policy propositions — no longer computes with a critical mass of Republican voters: not just in Ames, Iowa, but nationwide.
Paul and his (growing) army of faithful are no longer the lone data point. Michele Bachmann has built her campaign around a radical alternative to Republican spending orthodoxy. Sarah Palin fuels hopes of an even broader renunciation of the Republican establishment.
Even Mitt Romney now knows better than to re-run his losing proto-Pawlentyist campaign from 2008, when his change-nothing play for the mushy conservative middle left him obliged to spend millions to avoid T-Paw’s glum fate.
But time is running out on Romney’s current luxurious alternative, the anti-campaign. Rather than serving pabulum, Romney has served nothing; pointing a finger at Obama has been enough. No longer. He will have to offer, like any Republican candidate serious about claiming the nomination, a fundamental departure from the miasma of convention that clings to the Republican brand.
It’s not that Pawlenty’s brand of mainstream, fusionist conservatism is wrong. It’s that it misses the point. The principles are necessary, but the policies Pawlentyism derives from them are inadequate to the daunting task that Americans have — let’s face it — set before themselves.
Given how grievously we’ve undercalculated the real debt burdens at the state, local, and federal levels, an “ambitious goal” of 5% economic growth is not just absurd but dangerously so. (Perhaps real growth is in reach with a massive and open-ended influx of immigrants who are ready to work cheap and stay off entitlements. Good luck with that.)
Given how weary America has become of its network of military actions, a bear-any-burden approach to muscular interventionism sweeps all our serious strategic questions under the rug. (Note: We Americans are fine with wars. It’s the massive and open-ended imperial mission of garrisoning “restive tribal areas” that we rightly lose patience for.)
And given how deeply all economic classes have been penetrated by dependency on perpetual federal wealth transfers, the “Sam’s Club Republicanism” that anointed Pawlenty its poster boy cannot be taken seriously when it proposes to “reform” the country and the GOP by replacing our system of targeted tax credits with one of out-and-out wage subsidies.
The cultural and economic problems America confronts are structural. The lifelong biological family is unable to reliably function as a source of social order. The size and scope of the criminal justice system is unsustainable and corrosive. The magnitude of privately held debt spins nightmare scenarios in the heads of policymakers already hesitant to undo a system of governance dedicated above all to artificially maintaining for Americans of every class a lifestyle many of them could not accomplish on their own.
That may feel compassionate — or even merely prudent — but on anything more than the most shortsighted of timelines, it is neither. The endemic subsidization on which our virtual prosperity depends is incompatible with any fair view of Americans as a free people. And against that most serious charge, Pawlentyism — no matter how conservative in its convictions, commitments, and attitudes — has no answer.
Does any Republican approach? For now, it’s difficult to answer yes. But the contours of a satisfactory alternative to establishment drift are easy to recognize.
In foreign policy, end our indefinite military garrisons, increase our ability to poke hard with a sharp stick at key moments and help our cornerstone allies in Europe and Asia better assert a constant regional presence.
On criminal justice, legalize soft drugs, clean up the appeals and capital punishment process, overhaul our corrupt (and corrupting) prison system, and reform and reintegrate felons.
On border issues, permit brief stays for true migrant workers, and demand an immediate choice between citizenship and deportation for resident illegal immigrants without criminal records.
On social issues, embrace the Tenth Amendment, and work to defeat and reverse judges who don’t just legislate from the bench but philosophize.
And on the defining issue of our time — subsidy and entitlement spending writ large — begin the urgent task of painstakingly unraveling the cocoon of incentives, payoffs, behavioral modifications, and socioeconomic engineering that has forced well-off, middle-class, working-class, and poor Americans to choose between greater prosperity and greater independence.
There’s no reason a Republican candidate can’t embrace these or similar positions. They amount to a post-establishmentarian vision of governance that steps outside the box created by misleading categories like “extreme” on the one hand and “centrist” on the other. And they sharply rebuke the sitting president.
Tim Pawlenty didn’t flop because Iowans are crackpots or Tea Partiers are wingnuts. It’s not extremism along the traditional political spectrum that grassroots Republicans (and independents and others) want. It’s an extreme departure from that spectrum, which has become — to say nothing of the parlous state of the left — a license and excuse for a great drift into inadequacy by conventional fusionism on the right.
If the candidates counted as the winners in the wake of Pawlenty’s departure don’t grasp that fact, they might have beaten him, but they’ll have joined him, too.
So the grassroots has gone to extremes?
Which extremes are those?
Too bad the RINO Republicans have not woken up to the fact the Americans people have had enough of the status quo and want this Country back under the limits placed in the US Constitution by the people, for the people, and by the people.
RINO conservatives have forgotten who is the subject and who is the servant!
The elitist are now all saying “but, is she electable?” Damn right the Tea Party candidate's are electable, especially at a time when the American people are ready for a second revolution to bring this out of control government back under the control of the American people, and that is what scares the hell out of the RINO's and the liberal socialist as well!
The real reason Pawlenty failed ... because he’s a fake.
The people saw right through him.
Hmm.
A thread posted earlier (and defended throughout) by a Lazlo in PA is highly critical of a certain Republican candidate for president. Yet this piece is "dead on."
I'm wondering if there might be two Lazlos in PA, as this piece is suggesting that the winning candidate will need to change course to be more in harmony with the mood of the nation, that the old style of offering subsidies to an ever-larger portion of the American people is no longer possible as governments at all levels sink further into the debt abyss.
Specifically, he warns Romney that he "will have to offer, like any Republican candidate serious about claiming the nomination, a fundamental departure from the miasma of convention that clings to the Republican brand."
Now, it would appear that as of last Friday there are just two in the field of candidates who might approximate the author's ideal as an alternative to business as usual in the GOP.
One is Michelle Bachmann.
Can you name the other from the prescription offered?
In foreign policy, end our indefinite military garrisons, increase our ability to poke hard with a sharp stick at key moments and help our cornerstone allies in Europe and Asia better assert a constant regional presence. On criminal justice, legalize soft drugs, clean up the appeals and capital punishment process, overhaul our corrupt (and corrupting) prison system, and reform and reintegrate felons. On border issues, permit brief stays for true migrant workers, and demand an immediate choice between citizenship and deportation for resident illegal immigrants without criminal records. On social issues, embrace the Tenth Amendment, and work to defeat and reverse judges who don’t just legislate from the bench but philosophize. And on the defining issue of our time — subsidy and entitlement spending writ large — begin the urgent task of painstakingly unraveling the cocoon of incentives, payoffs, behavioral modifications, and socioeconomic engineering that has forced well-off, middle-class, working-class, and poor Americans to choose between greater prosperity and greater independence. There’s no reason a Republican candidate can’t embrace these or similar positions. They amount to a post-establishmentarian vision of governance that steps outside the box created by misleading categories like “extreme” on the one hand and “centrist” on the other. And they sharply rebuke the sitting president. Does any Republican approach? For now, it’s difficult to answer yes. But the contours of a satisfactory alternative to establishment drift are easy to recognize.
They sharply rebuke his immediate predecessor as well, I might add.
...Ron Paul...
Blow it out your ass, union-loving troll.
Why would he stand up to Romney when they hail from the same establishment wing of the GOP?
...Because they're too timid to stray too far from the status quo for fear of being labeled extremist. This is the reason Ron Paul is being demonized by the FReaks. Most of the candidates are running the same GOP-lite, Republican lighter, or neo-con new...
Fortunatly, there is still time for them to find the combination that will produce the same result, getting BHO out of the White House...
Because you want to be the establishment candidate, you gotta beat the establishment candidate....WHOOO !!!!
Small Ric Flair joke (while Flair is a north carolina resident, he was born and raised in Minnesota).
Sadly for the world, there is only one of me.
The writer is dead on as far as Pawlenty’s postmortem is concerned. His prescriptions for the party is not. If it were, there would be far more support for Ron Paul. There is not. Using the Straw Poll as a barometer for anything more than Iowan GOP fundraising is silly. By all polling available, Perry and Mittens are the front of the pack. Paul is behind. No one but the dope smoking anti war college kids support him.
Nice try in getting me to agree with the you on the sanity of Paul though. Unfortunately, I would rather sit home than vote for that man.
“On border issues, permit brief stays for true migrant workers.”
Given that the US can´t and won´t police overstays at present (with some jurisdictions openly refusing to enforce immigration law), what are the odds that these stays will really be “brief”?
“and demand an immediate choice between citizenship and deportation for resident illegal immigrants without criminal records. “
Words fail. So, the consequence of illegally immigrating to the US should be... immediate citizenship? Was this person drunk when writing the above?
“(Perhaps real growth is in reach with a massive and open-ended influx of immigrants who are ready to work cheap and stay off entitlements. Good luck with that.) “
Yes, because the economic problem currently faced by the US is... a shortage of low-skill labor!?!
Again, I must assume that the author was drunk while writing the above.
Plenty to disagree with here.
” The lifelong biological family is unable to reliably function as a source of social order.”
Well, it still does, to a lessened extent. Why is this so? Well, perhaps because the establishment has been waging a decades-long jihad to make it so?
“The size and scope of the criminal justice system is unsustainable and corrosive. “
Scope? Yes, to some degree. But I have a feeling the author is deeply naive when it comes to the origins of the expanded American prison and police system.
He had once used the term Obamneycare yet wouldn't use it with Romney on the stage.He attacked Bachmann and appeared small; smaller when her counter was strong.
A weak man running for the most powerful office in the world.
Fail.
I totally agree with every word in your post, but he is a nice guy, overall.
I hope he will run for the Senate.
Unless he’s going to be a RINO.
Then, I would withdraw my support for a Senate run.
Where did you get that demographic information?
Up here a lot of old farmers support him, too, not because they smoke dope, but because they remember the Depression, the mess since, and see fiscal policy which has taken us through the equivalent of the Roaring Twenties and to the brink of 1933.
They know what didn't work last time, and are looking for better ideas.
While I don't think Paul would be a good president, at the same time I have taken enough of a look at his ideas for domestic policy and think some of those have merit. A return to Constitutional limitations on the Federal Government would mean a severe downsizing of that institution, and save trillions in Federal expenditures.
It didn’t help him that he looks like a shoe salesman, and has less charisma than one.
I, for one, am glad he’s out.
OK. They lost me there.
There should be NO choice for legal citizenship for any illegal. They all must be deported and the first way to help them decide to go of their own volition is to not allow them any freebies, including medical care.
In the course of my current job I see hundreds of these illegals with wallets full of $100 bills all the while using every free service available, including schools and our local hospital.
They live 20 to 30 in a rented house and are still employed because, with their living conditions, they accept much lower wages than even our recent high school graduates.
I thought he was AWOL when Norm Coleman was screwed out of the Senate seat to Franken.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.