"Minnesota Republicans decisively rejected the comeback bid of former governor Tim Pawlenty... who proved unable to overcome his 2016 description of Donald Trump as 'unhinged and unfit'..."

Writes Michael Scherer in WaPo. And if you click on the link you might be momentarily befuddled because the article, which begins with that sentence and names only Tim Pawlenty in the headline, is illustrated with a photograph that's decidedly not Tim Pawlenty. It's Christine Hallquist, a transgender who just won the Democratic nomination for governor of Vermont.

“The Republican Party has shifted,” [said Pawlenty]. “It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician.”...

Pawlenty’s defeat came after he and his allies outspent Johnson by a margin of roughly 3 to 1, according to a Democratic consultant tracking the spending. When Trump recently visited Duluth for a political rally, Pawlenty decided not to attend....

Pawlenty got 43.9% of the vote.

Do Americans get the Midwest? Can a candidate with a midwestern accent and demeanor ever get elected?

When's the last time we elected a Midwesterner President? Ford doesn't count. He wasn't elected. You have to go back to Eisenhower and by the time we elected him, he wasn't just from Kansas anymore. He was from The World — The World War. And Kansas isn't even really the Midwest I think of as the Midwest. It's too far south. When's the last time we had a President from the North that is not the East?

Here's a list the home states of all the Presidents. I was surprised to see that I could have said we have a President right now from the Midwest! It never occurred to me — even as I rewatched that Bloggingheads segment — to think of Barack Obama as a Midwesterner, despite his connection to Illinois. His demeanor and his accent don't come across as midwestern. I think of him as coming from Hawaii.

I think we've never had a President from the North that is not the East. We've had a lot of Presidents from Ohio, and in that video clip, where I'm talking about Scott Walker's chances as a midwestern-style person, Bob Wright gets fixated on Ohio Governor Kasich, but Ohio isn't what I mean when I say Midwest. Note that I have lived in Wisconsin for the last 30 years, so I have an idea of the Midwest (and the North), but I consider myself from the "mid-Atlantic region," born and mostly raised in Delaware — just about exactly at the place where the Mason-Dixon line would cross if the mapmakers hadn't switched to using a compass when drawing the head on the little man called Delaware....



I am an insider/outsider in the Midwest. I think I get the cultural style that one sees in people like Tim Pawlenty and Scott Walker who seem too bland for outsiders. I mean that I also get The Not Getting of It. It might help that my mother and her family were from Michigan. Bob is from Texas, which is a big place, so maybe that's why he blithely groups Wisconsin with Ohio. He also sneered at the notion that Delaware is the South. I forgot to ply him with the question whether Texas is the South, but we were running out of time.

This post has become a grab bag of issues, so I'll load in one more, because news broke as I was writing this: "Lindsey Graham officially launches presidential exploratory committee." In the Bloggingheads clip embedded above, I talked about the problem of a Southern accent for a Republican candidate and say I think Americans have trouble with Lindsey Graham because of his accent. But the discussion of Midwesterners is not so much about the accent — though it is a problem if it's too exaggerated (as in the movie "Fargo") — it's the modest, low-key, seemingly bland style. But that problem could be an advantage. People might be in the mood for modest blandness. Of course, Scott Walker's opponents won't accept that picture of the man. They demonize him. How do you demonize modest blandness? Oh, it's an old game here intra-Wisconsin.

"New 'Crystal Ball' frontrunner for GOP nomination: Scott Walker?"

Allahpundit says "it’s the first time I’ve seen a major elections analyst name Walker as the man to beat."

I agree with the basic outline: There’ll be a centrist champion, a right-wing champion, and then a compromise candidate who can draw from both camps. Sabato thinks that’s Christie, Rand Paul, and Walker, respectively. I think it’s likelier to be Christie, Cruz, and Rubio, with Rand Paul an X factor fueled by libertarians, but oh well.

Walker is the compromise and somebody else is right wing? That sounds so weird here in Madison.

Sabato lists one of Walker’s potential key disadvantages as being too bland a la Tim Pawlenty. Really? The guy who broke the unions in Wisconsin and then humiliated big labor by winning his recall fight? He won’t have a blandness problem. 

Could you watch the video of Walker in the recall debate and rethink why he wins around here (and by here I mean Wisconsin, not Madison)? I'm not sure people around the country really get the Midwestern style. If you know Walker for standing up to the noisy protesters, you may picture him out there fighting, but in fact, he stayed calm and mostly out of sight and waited for the protests to die down, which they eventually did. The GOP had the votes in the legislature, so they simply took action.

Why is the Condi-for-VP rumor being floated?

1. It's a slow week, and everybody's looking for page views.

2. It helps offset the story about Romney getting booed at the NAACP convention, which conveyed the vague message that Romney has nothing to offer black people. What if he had Condi? That puts everything in a different light. Suddenly, he's not — what the hell did Rush Limbaugh call him? — "Snow White with testicles."

3. It's not much fun dragging out the veepstakes over the prospect that it's going to be Rob Portman, but it could be Tim Pawlenty. Quite aside from the white-with-testicles problem, it's just so predictable and dull. We need to be tantalized first, and nobody's more tantalizing than Condoleezza Rice. Except Sarah Palin. But Romney's too white-bread to tantalize us with Sarah. It's "white-bread" to go with the black lady? Yes! She's very solid and serious. She's gravitas personified.

4. Send the Obama campaign into a tizzy. Make them spend time and money preparing to push back Condi. Will they have to worry that she's more authentically black — American black — than Barack Obama? How will that debate about race be framed? Complicated. Here's something Rice said to the Republican National Convention in 2000: "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did." What will the Obama people do if that sort of thing is thrown in their face? Let them worry about it.

5. Somebody trying to make money on Intrade?

Why does Gingrich keep calling Mitt Romney "timid"?

He even uses the word "timid" as a noun.

It seems like the creators of the ad decided to play around with the name "Mitt," so they flipped it over to get "tiM," flopped it back so it's "Mitt" again, then put them side by side to get "tiM-Mitt," which sounds like "timid."

It some kind of palindrome!

And then what would happen if Mitt picked Tim Pawlenty as his VP? The brains of poets will explode. But what kind of an ear for poetry do we average Americans have? Perhaps it doesn't matter whether you notice. It's harder to defend against the subliminal effects. The words seep directly into your emotions. You get these uneasy feelings about the candidate, and you don't know why.

And then again, we do hear poetry in the language of politics: I like Ike... tricky Dick.... Even when you hear it and you can defend against it, you're hooked. You do like Ike. And Dick Nixon is tricky.

After his co-stater, a female, trounces him in the straw poll, Pawlenty drops out.

Aw.

"If Pawlenty was deeply annoyed to have to talk about Bachmann, a back-bencher in the state Senate when he was elected governor in 2002, who could really blame him?"

From "The Tragedy of Tim Pawlenty":

“Pawlenty has always been the establishment in Minnesota and Bachmann has always been the renegade,” says University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs. “Pawlenty thought that she was kind of a crackpot. He would roll his eyes when her name came up.” Democrat Roger Moe — the former longtime majority leader of the state Senate who lost the 2002 gubernatorial race to Pawlenty — describes his rival as “the kind of guy you can have a beer with” despite their political differences. But Moe cannot resist chuckling: “I can just tell you — I know for sure on the inside of him—that Tim Pawlenty is just seething over Bachmann. I bet they have to lock him in a room some days when he reads about her.”

Those stray quotes could be complete garbage, or, if not garbage, totally about the 2 individuals Pawlenty and Bachmann, but I can't help hearing the eternal theme of male reacting to female: The woman does not know her place. When she speaks, I hear crazy.

Michele Bachmann, challenging Obama in the empathy dimension.

"That Barack Obama is without a clue when it comes to the economy is no revelation, but that he lacks empathy — traditionally a Democratic refrain — is a bold and interesting twist. The fact is that Obama does often seem to be weirdly detached from the problems he ostensibly is trying to solve. Perhaps that is just his style; perhaps it suggests that his real objective is to advance leftist objectives like government takeover of medicine, not to improve the lot of working Americans. Be that as it may, the fact that Bachmann is an unusually empathetic person positions her, perhaps uniquely, to take that particular approach to Obama's failures."

Says John Hinderaker (a Minnesotan with a Minnesota conflict: he knows Bachmann but supports Pawlenty).

[Post title corrected: I didn't mean to write "the empathy direction."]

"Tim Pawlenty was debate night’s big loser. He walked onto that stage with one mission..."

"... to prove himself the ultra-base alternative to Romney. He failed, miserably. Pawlenty’s failure is not the kind of stumble he can correct later. It goes to the core of the guy: offered the chance to confront Romney directly, he flinched. He did not look 'nice.' He did not look like he was observing the 11th commandment. He looked uncertain and weak. He looked like a man fully aware that Romney would best him in a one-to-one discussion of healthcare policy."

Frum says.

ADDED: James Taranto said Pawlenty looked weak.

AND: Here's the relevant video of Pawlenty.

Live-blogging the Republican Debate.

6:14 Central Time: Just letting you know that I'll be here with the live-blogging when things start. Join me in the comments.

7:19: "Romney's already won," Meade announces, after Pawlenty gives a weak response to John King's repeated challenge of his use of the term "Obamaneycare."

7:26: A New Hampshire citizen frets about the influence of the Tea Party, and Santorum and Bachmann try to placate with platitutes. Bachmann speaks as if she's at a rally.

7:29: You can stream the debate on line here.

7:33: A federal right to work law? Pawlenty says yes.

7:37: Bachmann is asked if she prefers Elvis or Johnny Cash. An infusion of cuteness.

7:38: Ron Paul is tearing into another question. He's so crusty and cranky. It's refreshing... and a bit weird.

7:42: Romney looks good defending his position that the auto companies should have gone through bankruptcy. Obama, in effect, gave the bailout money to the unions, he says. King asks if everyone else agrees, but Santorum and Bachmann consume so much time answering that we don't get to find out if any of the others disagree.

7:45: Is everyone against the space program? Pawlenty's not. Gingrich thinks private business could run the program. Hard to picture that.

8:16: There's a question about the separation of church and state, and I'm struck that Ron Paul says, "The most important things is the First Amendment: 'Congress shall write [sic] no laws,' which means Congress shall never prohibit the expression of your Christians' faith in a public place." Why specify Christians? And under the First Amendment, there's freedom of speech for all opinions, including religious opinions. I thought that was bad of Paul, but Meade said, no it was great, because he won a lot of votes saying that. There are plenty of voters who will respond precisely because he said "Christians."

9:40: A good debate. I'd say all of the candidates did reasonably well, but wasn't Romney the big winner? He seemed believable as a leader, made no missteps, and none of the others landed a significant blow.

Romney tops Obama in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

WaPo reports Romney ahead 49% to 46%, among registered voters. (Among all Americans, the 2 men are tied at 47%.) Obama is ahead of the other 5 Republicans, and "[a]lmost two-thirds of all Americans say they “definitely would not” vote for Palin for president."

The Post-ABC poll asked Republicans and GOP-leaning independents whom they would vote for if a primary or caucus were held now in their state. Romney topped the list, with 21 percent, followed by Palin at 17 percent. No one else reached double digits, although former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has suddenly shown interest in becoming a candidate, is close, at 8 percent. Without Palin in the race, Romney scores 25 percent, with all others in the single digits.

Surely, a lot of that is name recognition. It's not really fair to Pawlenty. But let's see if the Republicans have the cohesiveness to resist tearing down Romney. Meanwhile, Democrats ought to make Palin their new McCain. Give her a free ride, until she's clinched the nomination... and then destroy her.

"The bottom line is Sarah Palin is not going to run for president... She's making money, she's moved on..."

"... she's kind of an entertainer rather than a politician. She still has some sway with the grass roots, but she is not going to run."

So says somebody close to Romney, according to Byron York. Somebody close to Pawlenty says something similar: "I don't think she's going to run... She has faded a lot in the last few months. I look at what she's doing now and say that she's found a way to get back in the story."

These people are in the middle of raising money and attracting attention to their candidate, so it's in their strong interest to diminish the rise of Palin. York acknowledges that his unnamed confidantes may be "just spinning." But he says, these are "serious people," and they point at her "lack of a campaign operation."

"Watch what she has done," says the Republican close to Romney. "Has she contacted one major donor across the country about putting together an organization? Has she talked to one member of the Republican National Committee about working for a campaign, or one governor, or one former governor about working for a campaign? The answer is no."

Maybe these "serious people" should be called conventional people. What did these "serious people" say when Palin was doing most of her communication via Facebook? Did the serious people say that serious people do not talk to the press and the public by writing Facebook updates? Because that would be conventional. Conventional people saying you're not serious because you're not conventional. But what if Palin is out ahead of them, and they can't see it? I wonder what these serious people thought about the Tea Party as it emerged?

York sees this, sort of:

It's possible Palin is in fact running and believes she can do so in a way that's never been done before. Maybe she can. It's certainly been tried; in 2007, former Sen. Fred Thompson and a small group of aides conceived of a campaign that would rely on Internet videos, social media and lots of buzz to gain support, with less reliance on old-fashioned things like shaking hands, begging for money and courting state party chairmen. It didn't work.

Strange contradiction there: "never been done before"... it's been done before and it didn't work. If Palin has a another new way, then it hasn't been done before, and you can't say it didn't work, based on the fact that "it" didn't work. We'll have to see what Palin's new way would be. But suppose it is essentially the same as what Thompson tried. The fact that it didn't work the first time it was tried doesn't mean it won't work the second time. And, obviously Sarah is not Fred.

York sees that:

Of course, Palin is a far more ambitious politician than Thompson. 

Yet the whole point of Fred was that he was the serious person. He was the adult in the room. Palin is the one so many people like to think of as a lightweight. Fred had an old-fashioned sort of gravitas, melded, perhaps, with some new ideas about how to campaign for President. It's 4 years later and Palin is a different person, with a different relationship to new (and old) media.

The serious, old-fashioned people are saying that there's a conventional, old-fashioned way to finance a campaign, and if Sarah Palin isn't using it, then she must not be running. And York is adding: If she is running, she will fail. But there may be a new way, despite what happened to Fred, and she may be doing it, and it may very well work. The Tea Party worked.

Things have changed since the days of Fred Thompson.

Krauthammer says Palin and Huckabee will probably not run for President in 2012.

And it's too early for Paul Ryan. And Trump is "a clown." Bachmann's a long shot. The serious candidates are: Romney, Gingrich, Barbour, Pawlenty, and Daniels. According to Krauthammer.

"Romney Wins New Hampshire Republican Party Committee Straw Poll."

With 35% of the 276 valid ballots cast. Ron Paul took 11%. Tim Pawlenty 8%. Sarah Palin, 7%.

Jonah Goldberg identifies "24 people who are beneficiaries of nontrivial presidential buzz."

"Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, David Petraeus, Ron Paul, Jeb Bush, John Bolton, Bob McDonnell, Jim DeMint, Chris Christie, Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Judd Gregg, Marco Rubio, and Rick Perry."

He then whittles it down to:

Romney, Palin, Gingrich, Pawlenty, and Daniels. Romney is the organizational front-runner; Daniels is the first pick of wonks and D. C. eggheads; Palin probably has the most devoted following among actual voters; Gingrich will dominate the debates; and Pawlenty (vying with Daniels) is the least disliked.

Real Clear Politics notes that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has proposed a truce on social issues so we can deal with financial problems...

... and asks Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty if he agrees. Answer:

I'm not sure what Mitch had in mind there but there's a whole coalition of people and interests and issues that comprise the conservative movement and the conservative perspective. I'm a fiscal conservative as well as a social conservative, so I don't think it's an either/or. I think it's both. And right now the economy is a pressing issue for the nation, and we're all primarily focused on that and jobs and the like, but that's not to say there isn't space to discuss other issues.

That's a lot of words. I feel like I'm still Trapped Under Wreckage. But if I take off my high-heeled shoe and I tap on something hard to attract attention, I think an answer emerges from the debris. It's faint, but my hearing is really sharp. The answer is yes.

"If you are trapped under wreckage..."

"... tap on something hard to attract attention."

Just an image I ran across Googling "Conelrad." Who among you remembers Conelrad? I only got to thinking about it because "Talkin' World War III Blues" attracted my attention:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Why did Bob Dylan's record player work when the radio didn't? You'd be more likely to have a battery-operated radio than a battery-operated record player. But you probably don't even have a record player anymore, do you? And I don't think your radio has the Conelrad symbol on it. Do you even remember what the symbol looks like? I don't. Some triangle? That's what I wanted to see when I got distracted by that poor trapped woman, who was not so unfortunate that she didn't have a stiletto shoe to use to tap out her distress.

What took me back to the old Dylan song? I wasn't worrying about World War III. (I have a book in the house — it was given to me — called "World War IV" and one of my sons, puzzled, said "When did we have World War III?") I wasn't worrying about that, I was selecting the ideal pronunciation of the word "paw" (or "pa") to explain how to pronounce the name "Pawlenty" so it didn't confuse me by sounding like "polenta." Now, Tim Pawlenty, like Bob Dylan, is a Minnesotan. We were talking about him, because he's in a bit of a dispute with Mitch Daniels — who, unlike Bob Dylan, is a Hoosier (like my interlocutor in this conversation I'm alluding too). I need to do a separate post on the Pawlenty/Daniels dust-up, though, because in this post, I'm trapped under wreckage.

"The emerging belief among many establishment Republicans that Pawlenty is becoming the sole viable alternative to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney..."

Disrespecting Sarah.

"Using mind control techniques developed on his home planet, Obama has unleashed an army of seductresses..."

"... in order to eliminate the men who stand in the way of his reelection in 2012. Based on the timing of the Sanford and Ensign affairs, it appears he launched the offensive before the first primary of 2008. I know this seems like a far-fetched theory, but it will seem a lot more plausible should Huckabee or Pawlenty ever hold the confessional press conference."

Live-blogging night 4 of the Republican Convention.

5:38 Central Time: Just setting up the post, so you'll know I'm going to do this again. Don't expect much for another 2 hours.

6:44: I just recorded a new Bloggingheads, with lots of talk about the convention. Now, I have the time to watch some things. Pawlenty is coming up in the next hour. Brownback. Hmmm.

7:07: Barack Obama gives a good speech, but the best sermons are lived, says Tim Pawlenty. He's trying to get the chant going: "John McCain put our country first." That was a little cheesy. Ah, but it didn't last long.

7:24: Brownback calls McCain "a history maker and a history breaker." That sounds like a line for the Steve Carrell character on "The Office."

8:01: Lindsey Graham says that everyone knows the surge is working. "The only people who deny it are Barack Obama and his buddies at MoveOn.org." Why? Because the Obama campaign is built on losing in Iraq, Graham says. McCain pushed for the surge, pushed against Republicans. It was unpopular. "Some said it was political suicide." John McCain "stopped the Democratic Party from losing this war." Strong stuff. Excellently delivered.

8:10: A little film about Sarah Palin. Co-maverick. "When Alaska's maverick joined America's maverick, the world shook." Some lovely pictures of people and landscapes. I especially enjoyed the shot of shelves of cut up fish meat to illustrate "hard work."

8:23: "It's not about talking pretty; it's about talking straight," says Tom Ridge, putting a lot of effort into sounding tough. "Let's call this maverick forward."

8:35: A nice film about Cindy McCain. Good works. Loving mom. And.... drift racing!

8:43: Cindy is speaking. She says we feel Abraham Lincoln's hand tapping us on the shoulder, then pauses, and it takes way too long for the crowd to pick up the applause cue. She makes a nice contrast -- a good liberal/conservative contrast -- between being concerned about what people in other countries will think and being concerned about what our forefathers would think.

9:02: "Obama to Dispatch Female Surrogates" -- NYT headline.

9:04: Excellent film presentation of the story of John McCain. Most notable is the idea that he survived the Forrestal fire because there was a plan -- God isn't named outright -- for him to do something more. Nice but intimidating contributions from Mother McCain.

9:17: McCain's speech. It feels rote sometimes and has an actorly passion sometimes. "I hate war," woke me from one of my dozes. "I've never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I didn't thank God for the privilege.... I was blessed by misfortune." The speech felt very long and had its ups and downs. After many diverse phrases, he got it together over the idea of service and the slogan "Country First." He spoke clearly and well about his early life, as a cocky selfish man, and his transition to a man in love with his country. Now, I'm watching the final waving, with the family and Sarah Palin. Where are the balloons? I obsess over the balloons. What if they never fall? Obviously, there is a huge balloon snafu. Finally, balloons. Why were balloons important? Ah, why is a speech important? The big idea is John McCain's life, and somewhere along the way tonight that point was made. It was made over and over. It's now for us to decide if we want this man to lead us for the next 4 years.