The Boston Globe pities Tim Pawlenty:

Pawlenty wasn’t a perfect candidate – or even, necessarily, the best option for the GOP. That’s an assessment voters should make.

It is fashionable to blame Pawlenty’s failure on Ames and its “corn-dog hokum”, but it’s just not true. Yes, Ames delivered the knockout blow, but he had been weak and staggering for weeks and even months before last Saturday. Other than Santorum, no one spent more time, devoted more resources, or built a more significant organization in Iowa than Pawlenty. This was what he had to do, because his path to the nomination required him to do very well in the Iowa caucuses, and whether people like it or not the straw poll does provide a useful test of a campaign’s ability to organize for the real contest.

Whatever the reason for their indifference, very few Iowan Republicans responded favorably. This was reflected in Pawlenty’s consistently poor polling, which was getting worse over time, and it created the impression that he was not inspiring any enthusiasm among the people he was meeting. Both of these compounded his existing fundraising woes. Most engaged Republican voters in Iowa looked at him and shrugged. These were the voters Pawlenty had been targeting for months, and they just weren’t interested. Donors noticed this, and withheld their support. After the bad showing at the straw poll, Pawlenty could expect that fundraising would become much more difficult, and he had already poured most of what he had into the last push at Ames. The prospect of poor fundraising in the months ahead was what actually killed Pawlenty’s campaign, just as it has killed Brownback’s and Quayle’s in the past. I don’t recall any lamentations accompanying their departures from the race.

Even some of the people voting for Pawlenty on Saturday were unenthusiastic about their choice:

“I did vote for him today,” she said. “He sounds like a good man. He sounds like he’s got the same Christian values.”

She’d come in with a group from the River of Life Church that was all voting Pawlenty, she explained. She was not in Ames out of any kind of personal passion for him.

Over in the food tent, Lavada Dennis, 74 and from Cedar Falls, was similarly noncommittal. “I’m a Pawlenty supporter. But it’s a long way from the election,” she said while eating a sandwich from Famous Dave’s BBQ. Texas Gov.

Maybe Pawlenty sympathizers can tell themselves that this is because he never really ran on his record, or they can console themselves with the fiction that he lost because he was too “nice,” but the reality is that Pawlenty presented himself to Iowan Republican voters early and often and still got nowhere. For some reason, many people regard this as unfair, but that is mainly because far too many people regarded Pawlenty as a major contender from the beginning. If he was a victim of any unrealistic expectations, it was the consensus that he was the plausible, acceptable alternative to Romney that did him in. Had everyone been judging him as the long-shot, unknown candidate that they judged Huckabee to be at this point in 2007, his third-place finish might have seemed perfectly respectable. Instead, he was inexplicably considered a top-tier competitor, this year’s near-equivalent of the 2007-08 Romney, and the expectations were therefore much higher than they probably ought to have been.