The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for me; I’ve been transitioning to a job where I have no computer access and I’ve been closing out my last semester.  So I haven’t had much time to engage on some of the important issues that have been engulfing the sphere.  Oh well.  Life requires priorities and I’ve preferred to spend my occasional free-time reading The Divine Comedy.  What I’ve missed I can’t make up.  Still, I do want to address, broadly, the argument DaveG has laid out, in multiple posts, pretty compellingly but ultimately, I think, wrongly.  In his post about the weakness of “The Perils of hyphenated conservatism” Dave laid into…yes, hyphenated conservatives.  Pawlenty was the prime target.  He writes:

The real issue with both Romney ‘08 and Pawlenty ‘12 is not that the Republican base demands pandering or phoniness — heck, if anything, the race for 2008 proved that the GOP base will reject rump-kissing, even if it’s the rump of the base that’s being kissed. Instead, the reason that Romney (and to some extent, Rudy and Huckabee) failed in 2008 and the reason that Pawlenty doesn’t seem to be going anywhere this cycle has to do with the delicate balancing act intrinsic in the candidacy of a hyphenated conservative.

The political class loves to play up the chances of hyphenated conservatives due to the supposed contradictions that lie within these candidates. “Sam’s Club Republicanism” gives pundits something to write columns about. “Compassionate conservatism” does the same. Rudy’s hawkish, soft libertarianism made Beltway types scratch their heads and think for a moment. So did Huckabee’s populist conservatism and Ron Paul’s hard libertarian realism. Folks who think about politics for a living find little to get excited about in a run of the mill, down-the-line conservative. It’s the heterodox that are interesting.

But while the chattering classes benefit from presidential runs by hyphenated conservatives, the Republican Party doesn’t. That’s because the hyphenated conservative comes out of the gate as a candidate who is by definition unacceptable to at least one segment of the Republican coalition, forcing the candidate to either change his views on those issues, making him inauthentic, or requiring the candidate to spend months and months emphasizing all the ways in which he is a “true conservative,” resulting is so much red meat thrown in so many different directions that swing voters become convinced they’re being asked to vote for Glenn Beck. The result is that a once perfectly respectable candidate ends up being branded a phony or a lunatic in the American political psyche.

There’s something to this, though I think Dave has fundamentally mislabeled the phenomenon.  The problem isn’t with hyphenated conservatism- all conservatism is hyphenated.  As is all liberalism.  Sometimes that hyphen is explicit- as in compassionate conservatism- and sometimes its not.  How often did Obama use the word liberalism, even in the primary?  Not very.  Instead he cut his liberalism with a dash of hope.  Hyphenated ideology is just political messaging and will exist as long as politics endures.  There’s a good argument that Bush destroyed the Republican coalition by governing as a compassionate conservative, but there’s no argument that he destroyed the conservative coalition by running as a compassionate conservative.

No, the seed of truth in Dave’s argument is this: candidate’s ought to be capable of satisfying the key elements of the coalition without having to lay wreaths at the grave of Ronald Reagan every day.  Still, it’s hard to see how this fits into the narrative DaveG has laid out about Pawlenty.  Whatever Ambinder and The Washington Post think, there is almost no evidence that Pawlenty has run hard to the right, or that he plans to do so.  He has, instead, run as the conservative he is.  Understandably, this disappoints the media corps.  Pawlenty has made a career of sounding more moderate than he is and, with Huntsman off in Shanghai, they’d counted on him to be their “good Republican”.

So the “Pawlenty is in danger of Romneyifying himself” meme is utterly predictable.  Still, there’s meme; Pawlenty, Sam’s Club Republican messaging aside, has a very conservative record.  In all likelihood, Pawlenty will finish governorship with an A grading, from CATO, in his final two years.  Occasionally, politicians manage A’s at the beginning of their term; Crist did, rather famously.  Jeb Bush did it, in his first term.  As did Matt Blunt and Bill Owens.  Even Arnold managed it.  If you’re in a relatively conservative state, or you’ve been thrust into a particularly challenging economic situation, it’s not impossible to govern conservatively when riding into office.  It’s much harder to keep governing conservatively or, more exceptionally still, to improve with time.  Jeb Bush fell to a C in his final two years; Bill Owens to a D.  Even Blunt only managed a B and he was governing a conservative state and had decided to become a one-termer.

In the entire time CATO has been running these analyzes, just 6 Governors have finished the final two years of a term with an A rating: Judy Martz, Paul Cellucci, Bill Janklow, Steve Merrill, Fife Symington,  and Doug Wilder.  Martz, Merrill, and Wilder were 1-termers; Celluci was less than that (he governed for 2 years).  Janklow was near to.  He’d been governor decades earlier and won 1 more term in the 90′s.  And Fife Symington’s no doubt promising two-term career was cut short due to his becoming a convicted felon.  In other words, not a blessed soul has governed for 8 years, and finished off as strongly, on fiscal policy, as Tim Pawlenty.  Mark Sanford might manage it next go around- might.  But then, Mark Sanford’s political career is as live as Symington’s.  So the idea that because Tim Pawlenty talks about a whole-sale store, while selling some of the most robustly conservative policies in the country, he’ll be rejected by fiscal conservatives, is ludicrous on its face.

They haven’t done so and show no signs of doing so.  Yes, he’ll have trouble finessing his environmental position, but I rather think the average fiscal conservative will be tickled that T-Paw managed to fob-off one of the country’s strongest environmental lobbies with speeches, a few million for alternative energy (which we ought to be investing in anyway), commissions, and non-binding environmental “goals”.  Yes, there’s a market for “punch a Democrat in the head”  politics, but even a majority of true believers will take their conservatism any way they can get it , and it’s abundantly clear, by his still positive image in Minnesota, that Tim Pawlenty is a way to get it.  Maybe THE way.

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Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com and at his Pawlentyesque blog