The Club For Growth, the big-money conservative group that advocates right-wing economic views — and has pushed some serious primaries against GOP incumbents along the way — came out Tuesday with its latest “White Paper” on a GOP presidential candidate, this time taking a look at Tim Pawlenty. Their verdict: “We struggle to identify the real Tim Pawlenty.”
The Club issued a review last week of Newt Gingrich, that was positive overall but cautioned that he “has a few doozies in his record.” They will have more white papers on the other candidates in the weeks and months ahead.
The Club notes Pawlenty’s history of favoring tax cuts, and his vetoes of various tax increases proposed by his state’s Democratic legislature. But on the other hand, they criticize him for having endorsed a local referendum to raise property taxes in his home school district, supporting a cigarette tax increase, his support for state biofuel mandates, and for not taking a public position on the Minnesota “Legacy Amendment” approved by the voters in 2008, which raised sales taxes by 3/8 of a percent for environmental and cultural preservation. And they also criticize his past support for cap-and-trade, which Pawlenty himself has recanted.
The Club’s bottom line:
It’s clear that Governor Pawlenty is, for the most part, hard to pin down on his exact ideological moorings. Minnesota is not a conservative state by any means, and Governor Pawlenty did veto tax hikes passed by the liberal legislature and made a relatively strong push to keep a lid on taxes. Pawlenty deserves tremendous praise for keeping Minnesota’s spending growth remarkably low. For this, and for his consistent stances on school choice, tort reform, and political free speech, he deserves credit – while his record on health care and entitlement spending is mixed. However, Pawlenty has some simply inexcusable tax hikes in his record, and he made a mistake by taking no clear position on the 2008 Legacy Amendment. His tacit support for bailouts, more job-choking regulations, and various tariffs make it difficult for us to identify his core ideological identity. His support of things like mandatory vegetable oil in gasoline, cap and trade, and a statewide smoking ban make him sound overly eager to support big government proposals to address policy fads of the day.
Given all of this, we struggle to identify the real Tim Pawlenty. We agree with those who say that Governor Pawlenty did the best he could in a state as liberal as Minnesota. And we believe he would be a stronger pro-growth executive in a more conservative climate, but his “clunkers” as he himself describes them are difficult to ignore. A President Pawlenty, we suspect, would fight for pro-growth policies, but would be susceptible to adopting “pragmatic” policies that grow government.
