Pawlenty may not be the next Romney, but John Thune might be. David Brooks was waxing panegyrical in his column on Thune today, and one thing he focused on was Thune’s alleged love of all things small and local:

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations [bold mine-DL]. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban[bold mine-DL].

Of course, that celebration was nowhere to be found when it came time to vote on the financial sector bailout last year. Like three-quarters of the Senate and, eventually, a majority of the House, he went for “the big and urban.” Thune voted for the bill, and even had the nerve to pat himself on the back for doing the politically dangerous thing. In fact, TARP was unnecessary, it was a dangerous grant of power to the executive branch, and it represented a gigantic swindle of the public for the benefit of financial institutions. Thune went along with most of the Senate in backing it. It’s true that Thune’s populism isn’t angry–it’s phony and opportunistic. He should do very well for himself in a party that rewards and admires politicians for just this sort of occasional, unreliable pseudo-populism.

Thune now hides behind the claim that he was misled when he cast his vote to grant the executive unaccountable power to use TARP funds however it saw fit. This is what every member of Congress who took the wrong position on a major vote tends to say nowadays when he had to answer for it later: the White House tricked me! Nothing inspires confidence in someone’s leadership abilities like the admission that he was easily fooled into making terrible mistakes. It’s a great campaign slogan: I’m so gullible, I even followed the Bush administration’s lead. I seem to remember that line of argument not working out very well for leading Democrats who voted for the war authorization in 2002.

Of course, the point opponents kept making was that there was no guarantee that the executive would use the money for the stated reason for the TARP. In fact, it has never been used for its original toxic-asset-buying purpose, because the government has never developed and likely never could have developed a mechanism for determing the price of these opaque assets. That doesn’t mean that the stated reason was a good one, and it does not mean that the program would have worked had they attempted to use it for its intended purpose, but the grant of power to the Treasury that Thune supported could have been used in any number of ways, which was why the sheer unaccountability and lack of oversight for the program were reasons enough to oppose it. Now that the public is sick of the bailouts, Thune has discovered that he, too, dislikes collusion between government and financial institutions, and in this he is just like Romney.