Michele Bachmann’s campaign warms up the audience with country music. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign warms them up with rock. On Wednesday night, one day before the Washington Examiner and Fox News debate and three days before the Iowa Republican straw poll, Pawlenty is ending the day with a 7pm event at Zeke’s, a rock bar in Ames. Pawlenty’s strategy is to stimulate turnout at the straw poll from people within a relatively short drive from Ames—not a bad strategy, since one-third of the 14,302 straw poll voters in 2007 were from the eight counties including and surrounding Des Moines, which includes Ames’s Story County. The Pawlentys are late and Mary Pawlenty—a former judge who not been on the campaign trail a lot yet—in jeans and a magenta top warms up the crowd with a fervent endorsement of her husband.
The rap on Pawlenty is that he isn’t an exciting speaker. That’s not in line with how I have seen him perform in various settings in Minnesota when he was governor and it wasn’t in line with his talk Wednesday night. In jeans and a blue shirt (when’s the last time you saw a candidate on the stump in a jacket and tie?) Pawlenty called for defeating Washington, D.C., and downgrading Barack Obama out of office. Obama believes in central planning, he said, “and central planning doesn’t work.” We’re a great nation, he said, beause we’re the freest. If we heard your stories, he told the 120 to 130 people (of varied ages; not just the elderly sometimes seen at Iowa Republican events), we’d hear incredible stories about families, faith, charities, church; we wouldn’t hear about government bureaucracies. It’s not the sort of talk you associate with moderate Republicans, a category into which some slot Pawlenty. It’s also somewhat more abstract, more steeped in the language of public policy issues and causes, than Michele Bachmann’s homier language. “We have to take this country back, or we’ll lose our most precious blessing, our freedom,” he says.
Why Pawlenty? “I’ve actually done this stuff.” In Minnesota, where he notes there are a lot of liberals, “I’ve cut spending, cut taxes, advanced the pro-life cause, championed traditional marriage. There’s a difference,” he says, “between giving a speech and getting it done.” It’s an obvious reference to she whose name goes unmentioned from the podium.
How effective are such appearances? Hard to say. Aides tell me there are more people here than in all his three earlier events today in the small west Iowa towns of Atlantic (which is a long way from the Atlantic Ocean), Harlan and Denison. He’s put 2,500 miles on his RV over the past three weeks and spoken at 80 events. He has been running television ads, though it was reported they stopped Wednesday. His campaign has hired buses, made thousands of telephone calls and sent out direct mail. But several people in the audience say they haven’t decided who to support yet. In the maddening manner of Iowa and New Hampshire voters speaking to political reporters, they say they’ve winnowed it down to three or four candidates. My own sense is that Pawlenty is the kind of candidate who should generate support from Iowa Republicans. But it’s impossible for me (and for his own campaign staff, I think) to say to what extent he has.
