This is Your Pawlenty Wake-Up Call

I don't know whether Pawlenty will be my candidate, but based on this analysis, he is someone to look at. So far, no one has broken out of a pack that has not yet been established. Time will tell if we have a candidate that will draw enough of the independents to claim victory over our "campaigner in chief".

Excerpt: Tim Pawlenty is a great candidate. It’s just plain nuts not to see this, emphasize it, and take advantage of it. Instead of pining away for Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, or Scott Walker to enter the race, why not wake up and recognize that Tim Pawlenty has already got everything the GOP is looking for — with two successful gubernatorial terms worth of experience to boot. What’s not to like?

Tim Pawlenty has already beaten the Democrats in a government shut-down battle. He’s defeated public-employee unions in a high-stakes strike. He was regularly rated as one of the most fiscally conservative governors in the nation. And he managed to do it all in a blue state. Pawlenty is Scott Walker with experience. It’s just that nobody knows it because Pawlenty’s clashes with his state’s public unions and big Democratic spenders happened some time ago. If anything, Pawlenty ought to be getting extra credit for having faced down public-employee unions and profligate Democratic legislators before it was cool. Are we really so dense — so utterly dependent on the latest news cycle — that we are going to let a major opportunity like Pawlenty slip away out of the misplaced worry that he’s got “no name recognition?”

That is a solvable problem. Just watch: “Hey, Tim Pawlenty was a great conservative two-term governor of Minnesota! He’s tough on defense, conservative on social issues, and well liked by people from both sides of the aisle. He’s faced down Democrats time and again and won. He’s got the biography of a lunch-bucket Democrat and the outlook of a fiscally conservative Republican. And he can win! Yes, Tim Pawlenty can beat Barack Obama in a head-to-head battle for the presidency of the United States. Wake up, Republicans! The answer to your prayers is already running. And if all the pundits would just stop fantasizing for a minute about everyone who’s not running, maybe they’d pay more attention to who actually is.”

Read National Review article here.