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The Result of the Beltway Process of Elimination

George Will made a list of “plausible” Republican candidates two months ago, and this list has been shrinking ever since so that it now contains just Tim Pawlenty. Earlier this month, he said that there were only three people who were likely to be inaugurated in January 2013: Obama, Daniels, and Pawlenty. Daniels is out, […]

George Will made a list of “plausible” Republican candidates two months ago, and this list has been shrinking ever since so that it now contains just Tim Pawlenty. Earlier this month, he said that there were only three people who were likely to be inaugurated in January 2013: Obama, Daniels, and Pawlenty. Daniels is out, and Will isn’t going to back Obama, so Pawlenty has become Will’s last remaining favorite. The trouble is that he doesn’t seem to have checked what Pawlenty has been saying until now, and he finds some of it very unsatisfactory:

To make the most of his momentum, he should stop criticizing Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention as insufficiently ambitious. Sounding like a dime-store Teddy Roosevelt (the real TR was bad enough), Pawlenty recently told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “I would tell Gaddafi he’s got x number of days to get his affairs in order and go or we’re going to go get him.”

Such chest-thumping bluster is not presidential, and it is not Pawlenty’s real persona. He actually is a temperate Midwesterner, socially and fiscally conservative.

Pawlenty is hardly alone in engaging in such bluster, and foreign policy pandering does strange things to people. It may not be his “real persona” any more than it Sarah Palin’s “real persona” when she began mouthing phrases given to her by Randy Scheunemann, but that is the national political persona he has adopted as a presidential candidate. He is stuck with it now, and so are his supporters. Then again, Pawlenty might be quite sincere in his reckless hawkishness. Pawlenty was a loyal McCain supporter throughout the 2007-08 process when others jumped ship as McCain’s campaign faltered in 2007. Why wouldn’t we expect him to imitate McCain’s own dime-store Teddy Roosevelt act?

Besides, if he wants to remain one of the approved “main contenders” Pawlenty can’t afford to be dubbed an “isolationist” by Republican hawks. Aside from the few trade missions he frequently boasts about, he has no specialized knowledge about international affairs, so he makes up for it by blustering and shouting. Unlike Huntsman, he has no foreign experience or expertise to fall back on, and unlike Bachmann he doesn’t sit on any relevant committees that might give him even a small amount of credibility when speaking on national security issues. Unfortunately, it is partly because he is considered a “temperate Midwesterner” that he has to overcompensate by sounding like the most aggressive hawk in the room. Will might have noticed this during the last two years when Pawlenty was demagoguing every foreign policy issue that came up.

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