Whether Gov. Pawlenty’s prescriptions—dramatically lower individual and corporate taxes, zero taxes on capital gains and dividends, sunset provisions for federal regulations and a growth-rate target of 5%—are provable as solutions is politically beside the point at this moment. As substantive brand differentiation, the Pawlenty speech was a success. ~Daniel Henninger

Henninger forgot the part where all of this supposedly slashes the deficit at the same time through the massive infusion of extra revenues. Yes, that’s “substantive brand differentiation,” all right. Pawlenty has branded himself as the candidate of wishful thinking and fantasy. Pawlenty’s “plan” is based on the idea that there are no trade-offs in making policy, and therefore there are no difficult choices to be made.

If Henninger means that Pawlenty stands to benefit politically from making unrealistic, fanciful promises that will never be realized, he may be right. Political candidates rarely hurt themselves during the campaign by making wild, impossible promises. As Weigel said recently, “base voters are suckers for promises.” The voters Pawlenty is trying to win over aren’t going to concern themselves with whether his proposals would achieve any of the things he claims. It doesn’t even matter whether his proposals would benefit them all that much, so long as he gives the impression that he is sufficiently fierce in his hostility to taxation. Meanwhile, the analysts who realize that the bold truth-teller is actually a snake-oil salesman weren’t likely to support him anyway.

Unfortunately for Pawlenty, his candidacy continues to languish in relative obscurity as far as the voters are concerned, and he needs to generate as much coverage as he can. Had Pawlenty delivered a remotely plausible economic policy speech, very few people would have paid attention to it, and it would have reinforced the view that Pawlenty is so very boring. No one’s saying that now. Some people are saying that Pawlenty is the new incarnation of George W. Bush, and some are saying that he is a con-man, but at least they aren’t still talking about how “nice” and boring he is. The most significant thing that Pawlenty may have done by giving this speech was to differentiate himself as a presidential candidate from the rather dull Minnesota governor that he has been until now.