Unneighborly

[Note: I'm heading off to Milwaukee for a few days, so there probably won't be any posting until after Saturday.]


As the Iowa straw poll looms, the GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination is beginning to heat up. Tim Pawlenty, stuck near the bottom of the list, has even taken to dissing fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachman to bolster his chances. His claim? She's too inexperienced.

Adding some fire to his rivalry with his home-state colleague, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Tuesday that Michele Bachmann did not have the requisite executive experience to be elected president in 2012. ...

After taking questions from Iowa voters in Marshalltown on Tuesday, Pawlenty directly questioned Bachmann’s credentials -- stating that experience running “a large enterprise under difficult and challenging circumstances with a public component to it and driving it to results” was “a necessary prerequisite” to being president of the United States.

“She doesn’t have it,” Pawlenty said of that experience, speaking to reporters at the Marshalltown Public Library in the midst of his “Road to Results” RV tour through Iowa.

Now, that's kind of an interesting tack. Pawlenty's home state legislature just went through a government shut down because it couldn't come to grips with a budget which would staunch looming deficits caused by Pawlenty's smoke and mirrors budgets during his terms as governor. That's not exactly the kind of experience fiscal conservatives should be looking for.

And the last former governor to reach the White House, George W. Bush had executive experience, yet managed to run the nation's economy into the ground with two unnecessary wars (both financed "off-budget") and tax cuts for the wealthy. He came into power with a budget surplus and magically turned that into a huge deficit. Fiscal conservatives certainly shouldn't want a replay of that kind of experience.

T-Paw just might be better off examining other ways of making his case to the voters in Iowa.