Steve Kornacki once again compares Tim Pawlenty to Phil Gramm, and says that Pawlenty has the same flaw of being “the guy who looks really good on paper, but not as an actual candidate.” I agree with the Gramm comparison, and I have made it before. My thought last month was that it would take a loss to Bachmann in Iowa for Pawlenty to suffer Gramm’s fate, but he has already started fading fast before any votes have been cast.

Comparing him to Gramm is slightly misleading in that Gramm was a more credible and prominent contender in the 1996 field, and he was able to raise money accordingly. Gramm was widely and correctly perceived as a candidate advaning economic conservative themes. If I recall correctly (and this old report confirms it), one of his pet issues was property rights. These were issues that were good for fundraising (Gramm had raised far more by this point in that cycle than Pawlenty has), but they were rather ill-suited to rallying social conservative voters in early contests. Gramm was also generally the antithesis of Buchanan on trade and immigration in a year when Buchanan was still gaining some traction on these issues.

The comparison with Gramm isn’t perfect. Oddly enough, it is not because Pawlenty is too populist on economics, but because he pretends to be a populist when he is not. Pawlenty is caught in the bind of trying to be a conventional free trader and economic conservative after having defined himself with pseudo-populist rhetoric about “Sam’s Club Republicans” and trying to identify himself to some extent with Huckabee (including hiring his daughter as a senior political adviser). Pawlenty has no distinctive political identity without what one of his former opponents referred to as his “whole class-warfare shtick,” which is a problem when Pawlenty wants to run on an economic agenda that heavily favors corporate and wealthy interests. At the same time, the shtick is just that and nothing more, so there is nothing that would attract working- or middle-class voters who might initially think that Pawlenty would represent their interests.