The Veep Obama didn’t want to face

The Veep Obama didn’t want to face



The candidate who inspired the most apprehension in the Obama camp wasn’t Paul Ryan — not by a long shot.

It was former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Yep, the same TPaw, an affable high school hockey goalie who was deemed too Minnesota nice, too poorly managed and inexperienced — and too willing to dive out of the GOP primary when he was attacked to survive on the national stage.


For the past several months, Obama campaign officials and Democrats close to the campaign have privately expressed the opinion that Pawlenty’s primary season flaws would have been transformed into virtues in a general election. A lengthy paper trail is a noose in national politics, so the fact that Pawlenty was a virtual unknown outside the Midwest might have been his greatest asset.

Obama’s team doesn’t dismiss Ryan’s strengths — youth, energy, brains and a policy-grounded integrity that contrasts with Romney’s shape-shifting reputation.

But they have a ready-made line of attack rooted in the Ryan budget, the most potent weapon in the Democratic attack arsenal perhaps since the Iraq War, according to some in the party.

They had nothing comparable with which to hammer Pawlenty.


“Everybody on our side has been mobilizing for two years against the Ryan budget. He’s a hugely known commodity,” an Obama adviser said. “Pawlenty was an unknown commodity. It would have been a lot harder to define him in three months.”

The person added: “All the terrible things Romney is planning to do? Ryan has already done them.”

That was an opinion shared by at least one Democratic pollster, who also saw the low-key Pawlenty as a more significant threat.

In an email Saturday, Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina described Ryan as the “architect of the radical Republican House budget.”

Ryan, like Romney, “proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid. His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors,” Messina said. “As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.”


The anti-Pawlenty press release might have looked roughly the same, but Democrats think they would have had a harder time making it stick.

During a campaign in which the paradoxical Holy Grail is blue-collar, job-creating fiscal conservatism, Pawlenty had the perfect back story, a rival to Joe Biden’s tale of post-Depression era struggle in Scranton.

His father Eugene Joseph Pawlenty drove a milk truck. His mother Virginia Frances Oldenburg died of cancer when he was 16. He dreamed of being a dentist. He was the first kid in the family to graduate college.

Last week, auditioning for the No. 2 job, Pawlenty escorted a CBS reporter around the campaign office in Raleigh and delivered an earthy, lighthearted but devastating criticism of Obama: The president — who once bungled the pronunciation of Yuengling — was “all foam and no beer,” he quipped.

“Then,” the correspondent wrote, “He shook every hand in the room.”

There was no consensus internally on who would pose the biggest threat after TPaw, but, in general, many of those around Obama felt that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio would have been trouble because of his ability to electrify a crowd, excite the GOP base and possibly cut into Obama’s lead among Hispanics.

Like Ryan, however, they believed him to be a rich target based on a series of controversies that surrounded him during his days as Florida state legislator. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, while regarded as another policy heavyweight, would have been a good draw from the Obama camp’s perspective because of his connections to President George W. Bush.

Pawlenty would have been a boring pick. But he had few if any glaring liabilities — deadly in an ugly, scorched-earth year.

Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod had been telling associates earlier this year that he thought Pawlenty was going to — and probably should be — Romney’s pick, according to several Democrats.

Not surprisingly, Romney’s decision to go with Ryan has spawned a bit of a conspiracy theory among Democrats, albeit one completely bereft of evidence: The former Massachusetts governor wanted to pick Pawlenty, who has allied himself with the campaign in the summer of 2011 — but had to choose Ryan to appease conservative power brokers such as Rupert Murdoch.

“It’s a preposterous suck-up to the right wing,” a top Democratic pollster said on Saturday.

Romney advisers dismiss this as nonsense — but they have yet to detail the process that went into tapping the youthful chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Pawlenty handled the rebuff with grace. “I’m keeping my schedule tomorrow, so I won’t be in Virginia,” Pawlenty told reporters in New Hampshire late Friday, nearly four years to the day after his last Lucy-and-the-football moment when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin over the then-Minnesota governor.

“I didn’t enter this thinking I would be the V.P. candidate, so I’m not disappointed,” Pawlenty said. “I’m excited about his candidacy and I’m excited about having him as president.”

The most obvious line of attack against Ryan will be his plan to turn the almost universally popular Medicare program for seniors into a voucher-based system for people currently under 55. The proposal has gained traction with conservatives. But it has been the bane of the GOP campaigning class, with an almost unheard-of 65 percent to 80 percent of voters rejecting any significant reduction of the middle-class health care entitlement considered to be the largest driver of the $14 trillion long-term federal deficit.

For all the bravado, Democrats fret the unknowns. Ryan, compared to Pawlenty, comes from a background of relative privilege, growing up with the relative economic security provided by a successful family contracting business.

But he’s a forthright and likeable guy, who worked his way through college by tending bar and working in a gym. And like Pawlenty, he’s no cyborg. His early life was marred by a personal tragedy chillingly similar to Pawlenty’s.

“My dad died when I was young,” he told the crowd in Norfolk Saturday. “He was a good and decent man. I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. ‘Son, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’”

Most important, he also has knack for expressing sharp ideological differences without appearing to be mean-spirited, a characteristic shared by Biden, Pawlenty and Obama when they are on their game.

“The other thing my dad would say is that every generation of Americans leaves their children better off. That’s the American legacy,” Ryan added.

“Sadly, for the first time in our history, we are on a path which will undo that legacy. That is why we need new leadership to become part of the solution — new leadership to restore prosperity, economic growth, and jobs. It is our duty to save the American Dream for our children, and theirs.”

 

Give me a break, whoever wrote that article just seems to like to hear the sound of their own voice, there is no one (including obama) who was ever scared of that little goober pawlenty.

 

Not scared of him,but they couldn't attack him.Obama is in full attack mode,they wanted a VP they could attack imo.Being able to tear down romney and the vp is better then just being able to tear down Romney

 

Here is the source of the GOP's weaknesss. They do not know what kind of conservatism to bring to the nation. They chose Southern conservatism, when what they should have done is chosen MIDWESTERN conservatism. You would think that they would know better considering their greatest modern President was born in Eureka, Illinois.

Midwestern conservatism is polite, down to earth, and practical.

Southern conservatism is, well.....the confederacy.

The nation will reject this again.

So we have now the King of Bain and the man who wants to cut farm subsidies in a drought year.

The GOP is just plain stupid.

 

Psychobabble....
The Confederacy could only come from the Democrats....To engage in a civil war to keep slaves would never have come out of the Republican party

 

It's sad that our beloved hope and change President can only attack during this election as he has nothing good to say about himself or what he has done in office the last 4 years. It's worse than sad. It's pathetic.

 

You continue to remain confused about something myself and others have consistently explained to you. Therefore I can only conclude that you are developmentally delayed in this area.

 

The Black community needs to feed the race card so they refuse to accept the DNA of the Democrats. They refuse to see that Blacks in the urban cities are victims of separate but equal polices in the way of the Southern Democrats.
They refuse to admit that Blacks are leaving the Northern cities to go back to the Republican South for better opportunities.

All you hear is that the Southern Republicans are the same racists bigots the Southern Democrats were. If that were true why wouldn't Blacks be leaving the South instead of moving there?