Pawlenty: Uphill climb for GOP

10/28/2005

As a glum Pawlenty said Republicans are “on the ropes” nationally and Minnesota remained an uphill climb for the party, DFL rival Attorney General Mike Hatch racked up another labor endorsement.

Patricia Lopez,
Star Tribune
Last update: October 27, 2005

On a day when DFL gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch locked up his third quick labor endorsement, an uncharacteristically downbeat Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty acknowledged that his party is “on the ropes” nationally and that he would consider himself “lucky to get reelected.”

In a frank and wide-ranging interview with Minnesota Public Radio on Thursday morning, Pawlenty denied that he has any national political ambitions and downplayed the notion that Minnesota had trended Republican.

“I’ll be lucky to get reelected governor in Minnesota next year,” he said on MPR’s Midmorning Show.

As recently as Wednesday at a St. Paul appearance, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman played up his party’s chances to take the state. But a rather glum Pawlenty on Thursday said Minnesota still “is a tough state for a Republican. It is still a Democratic state a bit, so any Republican is going to have a bit of an uphill climb. ...

“My only political plans are to get reelected next year, and I hope that I do,” he said.

Pawlenty said his formal announcement will come sometime this year or early next year, but he has left little doubt that he intends to run and already has started training his focus on his chief rival, Hatch.

Pawlenty called Hatch a “very divisive and polarizing force” and said that for Hatch to say he could be a healing force to bridge differences in a deeply split state was “not a very credible claim.”

Hatch, who added Thursday’s endorsement by the Service Employees International Union to those of the Minnesota nurses and steelworkers unions, shot back that “I’m not the one with 45 percent negatives,” citing a recent poll by Bill Morris, a former Republican Party chair and independent pollster. In that poll, Pawlenty’s approval rating hovered at 48 percent.

At a Thursday news conference, Hatch said health care would be his first priority, adding that the business community is in the forefront of demanding health care reform and that lack of affordable health care is stifling small business growth.

No “weenie move”

Pawlenty said during his radio interview that many things were going right in Minnesota. He cited an improving economy, high school test scores and a well-rated business climate.

But he noted that national and local events, from potential indictments of top Bush officials to this year’s disastrous legislative session, could well take a toll in 2006.

“Things aren’t going well for the president or the Republican Party nationally,” he said. “That’s fairly obvious.”

In a more lighthearted vein, Pawlenty joked: “I hope voters are smart enough to know that I’m not involved in the Valerie Plame affair; I didn’t leak the name of a covert agent.” That was a reference to the outed CIA agent whose case now threatens the top echelons of the Bush administration.

Pawlenty also qualified a recent statement—that he would stand by Bush even if he were at “2 percent” in the polls—saying that he was not pledging “blind allegiance” to the president.

Rather, he said, it was a statement of personal friendship. “I don’t embrace everything Bush says,” he said. “I don’t mean I’m going to blindly follow every policy initiative. But politics is smarmy enough without people bailing out on friends just because times are tough. That’s a weenie move. I’m not going to run away like a little chicken from President Bush because he’s unpopular.”