Everyone's saying it's him - let's assume everyone is right
Yawn.
Smallest upside. Smallest downside.
What a difference two years makes for Pawlenty. To go from winningreelection in 2006 by 1% - aided by an embarrassing outburstfrom his opponent five days before the election - to the VicePresidential nomination is a big jump.
That said, Pawlenty is a capable executive, has a nice bluecollar background (slightly inflated by the Sam's Club meme), issolidly pro-life with a good evangelical political base, and issignificantly more experienced than Obama. In all, he representsthe future winning coalition for the GOP (or rather, if it canreach middle class Latinos along with the white working class,it'll be a winning coalition).
This pick shows that McCain doesn't believe he needs to freakingimpress anyone. He'd rather pick someone he likes personally,someone who is ethically sound, represents a blue state, and willnot offend any significant niche of the base - in other words,McCain's passing on testing the boundaries of politicalhistory.
Pawlenty truly likes and admires McCain. But one wonders if thispick would've gone differently had Mark Sanford chosen to endorseMcCain, and support him in South Carolina, earlier this year.
If you had asked who the likeliest VP choices would've beenprior to this primary, Sanford and Pawlenty would've led the list.After all the other names being thrown around, it says somethingabout the incentive to pick an executive (in an otherwiseall-Senate year) that one of them ended up with it.
Pawlenty is a better pick than Romney, certainly a better pickthan any of the KBH/Ridge pro-aborts, and a marginally better pickthan a roll of the dice like Palin. It lacks any of the sex appealof Joementum (and this is the first and last time "sex appeal" and"Joe Lieberman" will appear in any proximity to each other), butneither does it have any of Lieberman's very real negatives. I willstill believe that Cantor would've been a better choice, but we'lljust see what his future holds.
McCain clearly believes that Obama-Biden is self-destructing -weighted down under their own hubris and a campaign staffed bypeople who know how to win small-money caucuses, not big-moneygeneral elections. And he won't interfere with that pattern bygoing outside of the box.
But if he wants to contend for 2012-16, Pawlenty needs to bringback the mullet.