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.