If Salam and Douthat have someone in mind to fit their perscriptions to cure what ails the GOP, that person would undoubtedly be Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. “TPaw,” as he’s known here in the Upper Midwest, all but announced his 2012 presidential candidacy yesterday by announcing he would not run for a third term.

Pawlenty doesn’t have an identifiable base within the party unlike Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul nor can he write checks to his campaign like Mitt Romney. Raising money in these tight economic times will be a problem for him and he’s not connected to any kind big sugar daddies either. Nor has he won a statewide election by a majority of the vote. He can thank the Minnesota Independence Party for his two gubernatorial victories. And he hasn’t been really tested on the national stage yet.  But what he does have is the advantage of position. He can legitimately say he can unify all the party’s factions because he can be agreeable to most if not all of them.

Religious minded Republicans will like the fact he opposes abortion and homosexual marriage, although not too dogmatically. The Club for Growth will like the fact he hasn’t raised taxes in Minnesota (unless you smoke heaters or like to pedal on bike paths, in which case he’s raised taxes and fees on you quite a bit in his term but I doubt the Club would be so puritanical to oppose him on it). He is of Croatian decent from the working class town of S. St. Paul, son of a truck driver. He has an “aw shucks” and good natured style to him that doesn’t make him foreboding. He’s also young at age 49 and has some potential hipness to him unlike Mitt.  Where he stands on foreign policy is anyone’s guess but no doubt he’ll hue a line that will be at least acceptable with the party rank n’ file on such questions (and since no one else in the presumed field will have a lot of foreign policy experience its moot point anyway). His willingness to be a good soldier for the party and run for governor instead of U.S. Senator in 2002 (which was probably the job he really wanted) will please those looking for a good party man. In short, he could be the kind of candidate that lost of people people can read into what they want and support in that fashion.

Looking at Pawlenty closely, one could say he’s a northern version of Mike Huckabee and there are a lot of surface similarities to both men but one crucial difference that could be to Pawlenty’s advantage. Huckabee’s “downscale” GOP base may very well have been victim class snobbery by the Club for Growth as Larison pointed out last year. Pawlenty would not suffer from such attacks because he came up politically through the Twin Cities suburbs rather than rural Arkansas. Pawlenty started his career as a city councilman in the middle class Minneapolis suburb of Eagan before going to the state legislature and then to the governor’s mansion. He abandoned Catholicism for a suburban evangelical megachurch.  Pawlenty better fits the profile of the kind of voter the GOP is looking to attract rather than someone from the rural South who would vote for the GOP candidate no matter who or what they were. That may seem regionally bigoted but it’s the truth. If Huckabee and Paul’s problem is they fit too well into defined bases, if Romney’s problem is that he’s too establishment, too wealthy and (again bigoted) too Mormon to win the GOP nomination and Palin’s problem is that she’s too base raw and a vice-presidential loser to win, then going with Pawlenty as a comprise choice may be very attractive to ordinary, non-ideological, plain and ordinary GOP voters.

Oh, there’s also a tactical advantage Pawlenty has as well. He lives right next door to Iowa and not being governor will give him plenty of time to campaign there.