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Elites and Wonks

Politico reports on the unhappy conservative elites whom Paul Ryan has spurned (via Antle). The story recounts the Ryan and Daniels enthusiasms, and then says this: When Daniels turned his back on the draft movement, Tim Pawlenty sought to move into the Hoosier’s wonky space. Is that what Pawlenty was doing? I can agree that […]

Politico reports on the unhappy conservative elites whom Paul Ryan has spurned (via Antle). The story recounts the Ryan and Daniels enthusiasms, and then says this:

When Daniels turned his back on the draft movement, Tim Pawlenty sought to move into the Hoosier’s wonky space.

Is that what Pawlenty was doing? I can agree that Pawlenty was eagerly pandering to the editors of The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary, and they provided some of the most positive and glowing coverage of his policy speeches, but this seems very different from inhabiting Mitch Daniels’ “wonky space.” If Daniels’ refusal to pander was refreshing to some policy intellectuals, Pawlenty’s desperation to pander was rewarded with frequent praise. If anyone looks at the content of Pawlenty’s policy speeches, however, what one finds are not really the products of a wonkish candidate and policy-oriented campaign. Instead, we find a fantastical economic plan and Bush-era retread foreign policy ideas.

Politico‘s account describes the speeches quite differently:

The former Minnesota governor gave substantive speeches on taxes and spending as well as foreign policy.

Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by substantive. The speeches certainly had content. The content just happened to be easy to ridicule and dismiss as unrealistic on economics and dangerous on foreign policy. It is true that many hawks cheered on Pawlenty’s speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the WSJ editors celebrated Pawlenty’s plan, but that just confirmed that they were much more interested in having Pawlenty say the things they wanted to hear. Pawlenty’s economic plan was the kind of proposal that leaves actual domestic policy wonks on the right shaking their heads. As Ross put it back in June:

Instead, most of Pawlenty’s agenda is a mix of “half-remembered bits of Reaganism,” transparent gimmicks (a balanced-budget amendment that caps spending at 18 percent of G.D.P.) and straightforward magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts.

The article today quotes Ross as saying that conservative intellectuals were comfortable with Pawlenty. He said, “You got the sense that he was interested in public policy.” Perhaps. The impression I had from a distance was that he was interested in appearing interested in public policy to win approval from conservative elites. He seems to have succeeded in that, but it may have been one of the reasons why he fared so poorly with everyone else.

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