Seth Mandel skewers Tim Pawlenty’s new plan to pretend that he is the scrappy underdog in the presidential race:

Running as the underdog in a campaign is a last resort. Billing yourself as the mainstream candidate and then switching to the underdog before the primaries have even begun is a sign of desperation. Looking desperate for six months before voters have the chance to cast a ballot will cement that image in their minds. And voters don’t ask that guy to be the leader of the free world.

More to the point, Pawlenty’s reinvention of himself less than two months since he formally announced his candidacy confirms Sean Scallon’s critique of Pawlenty as a hopelessly inauthentic politician. Running to be the default anti-Romney, Pawlenty has achieved what no one thought possible a few months ago: he has made Romney seem reliable and steady by comparison. Mandel is right that Pawlenty is likely hastening his political demise by changing plans, but the decision to do so is something that reveals more than mere desperation. Rather than an abandonment of the reason for his candidacy, it is an admission that his candidacy never had a rationale. Pawlenty is confirming that the candidate he was pretending to be for the last several months (or years, depending on when we start counting) was little more than an act. Worse still, Pawlenty’s act was based on the belief that all that he needed to do was check off all the right ideological boxes to satisfy the “three legs of the stool” and the voters would gravitate towards him as a matter of course. To defeat Romney in 2012, Pawlenty has run the equivalent of another Romney 2008 campaign, but this time he has tried doing it without very much money. In that way, he has managed to combine the major flaws of both Romney and Huckabee without the advantages of either one.