Geotrickster’s Note: Self-serving politician memoirs, particularly of failed Presidential candidates, has been a running gag in a circle of friends of mine for years. The book held up as the iconic example by us in this ‘genre’ (for some reason) has long been Tim Pawlenty’s ‘Courage to Stand.’ Pawlenty’s 2012 campaign had the dubious distinction of being hyped as inevitably nomination-clinching by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who had previously predicted that the 2008 race would be an inevitable showdown between Rudy Guiliani and Hillary Clinton. This eventually culminated in me giving my friend and now four-time guest contributor Brandon a copy of this book as a gag gift when visiting him in 2021. Of course, none of us ever actually read any of these things cove to cover…until now. With the recent predictable and hilarious removal of Meatball Ron from the oven of being a presidential contender (see two entries ago for my eulogy of that) it seems it was finally time for Pawlenty to get his due.

Without further ado, the following words are that of Brandon Hensley alone. Amazing how we went from gaps of years between his guest postings to gaps of weeks:

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Memoir, in general, is my least favorite book genre.  Two of my favorite women in all of history are Lucille Ball and Cassandra Peterson. I own both of their memoirs and I have never read either of them. I simply don’t have a great deal of interest in the private lives of celebrities, even ones I happen to particularly like. This might have something to do with the fact that I have somehow managed to avoid developing weird parasocial relationships with Youtubers or Tiktokkers, as well. But then, I was also able to quit smoking without blinking, so maybe there’s something genetic there.

Conversely, I’ve always been weirdly fascinated by the Presidential Primary Candidate Political Memoir. This is not a genre that Amazon or the New York Times recognizes, but they absolutely should.

A political memoir is simply the memoir of a political figure that narrows its focus from the broad biographical details of one’s life to the politically-salient biographical details of one’s life, and probably provides some sort of policy recommendations by the author.

The Presidential Primary Candidate Political Memoir, by contrast, is exactly the same except it is conveniently published conspicuously close to a Presidential Primary. It’s almost like a trunk novel that a politician has been carrying around for a while and tweaking every so often to keep it relevant until it becomes necessary to throw it into the marketplace and see how it helps the straw polls. Or, in the absolutely shitfacing hilarious situation of Hillary’s “Hard Choices” (2014) and “What Happened” (2017), the memoir bookends the election she lost. (“What Happened” also has the dubious distinction of having the question and the answer [in the form of the author’s name] prominently displayed on the front cover, gracefully saving people from wasting their money or time on it)

The reason the PPCPM is so interesting, however, is because it does what no other act of speaking on the record can do. It provides a single reserve summation of a political candidate’s moral character, fitness for office, and proposed manifesto. There is no amount of NYT article digging, CNN interview searching, or internet archive campaign website recovery that will amount to the convenience and cohesiveness of a PPCPM. If a candidate says one thing on CNN and then another on FOX, it’s a gaffe. If they’re quoted as saying something in the New York Times that they later say was taken out of context in the Washington Examiner, that’s just media spin. But what was committed to paper by them is a whole other story.

A couple years ago, Chris (yes, the owner of this very blog!) gifted me a PPCPM as a joke. Up to then, Tim Pawlenty was widely regarded as having run one of the worst Presidential campaigns in history. He barely raised any money, barely registered in polling, and, like current Vice President and 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, dropped out of the primary before a single vote was ever cast. Having just finished Dianetics a couple weeks before Ron DeSantis stole Pawlenty’s crown of glory, it made sense that now was the time. Time to stand up and read “Courage to Stand: An American Story”.

There are two problems with a PPCPM that is now twelve years old and about to celebrate becoming a Bar Mitzvah.

1. Nothing in it is that relevant; and
2. Even if it can be mined for “ha ha, look at this hypocrite!” points, they’re all points that have already been made.

So I settled on option three: make fun of Tim Pawlenty because he has clearly never heard the word “recliner”.

I am not fucking joking.

“Grandma Rose always had cookies or treats at the ready. It seemed as if the measure of her love for others included how much food she could force into every one of us. Mostly sweets, of course, unless you were there for lunch or dinner, when you’d get some form of potato, or some form of sausage or other affordable meat. And she dispensed matronly advice with every plate.

“Some days I visited her by myself. I’d sit in her oversize grandma chair with the reclining feature, where you could pull the lever and get your feet up in the air.” (emphasis mine)

I am not making this up. He uses twenty-one words to describe a recliner, including the word for reclining. And it’s not the only time. He repeats his performance:

“It’s funny how the simplest things can leave the deepest impressions. Like when Dad and I watched television at night. I remember the two of us setting up those rickety old television trays to eat something and watch some show. I can’t even remember what we watched. … He’d sit in his La-Z-Boy with the leg-up option, and I’d sit in my chair, and we were the kings of the world!”

Again! He cannot bring himself to use the word “recliner”. He’s not even consistent with his failure to understand that a word exists to describe the thing he is talking about. It’s either the “reclining feature” or the “leg-up option”. I’m surprised that he didn’t borrow some sort of Seussian neologism in the process.

But it’s not just his inability to articulate the derived noun from the root recline that’s bothersome. He makes a really strange biographical point when recounting the passing of his mother.

“I later learned that in her very last hours, she pulled my two brothers and two sisters together around her hospital bed and told them directly, ‘Whatever you do, you get Tim to college.’ She made each of them promise to follow through. It was her dream for me, a dream she had instilled in me herself. She could not go peacefully without knowing that her dream would be fulfilled.”

I am not one to make light of a dying woman’s wish. Having watched my own mother die in a hospital bed, I am not a stranger to just how powerfully emotional that event is. And I was in my thirties when my mom died. Tim was only seventeen. But what’s weird about this is the way it’s phrased. It sounds as though she could give a shit less about her other four children. Only Tim gets to go to college. Fuck the rest of them, right? Partly this might be Tim’s own doing—he doesn’t actually say much about his siblings, but he especially doesn’t say if they went to college. Perhaps they were already in college? Who knows? Tim doesn’t say. But then, knowing that his mother’s dying wish is that he go to college, he says in a later chapter:

“But first, I had another important decision to make—whether to follow through on my mother’s dream that I would go to college.”

What a fucking turnip. Again, based entirely on what he has told us, we cannot be sure that his mother put this same premium or emphasis on his siblings. It is entirely possible a sister or a brother forewent the opportunity to ensure that Tim got to go. And here he is dilly dallying on whether or not he’ll go. Asshole!

Oh wait. Immediately after this he tells us precisely how many of his siblings got to go to college:

“No one in my family had earned a college degree before, (though Dan [a brother] attended classes briefly), so my family had no institutional memory on the subject.”

ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE.

Also, he was clearly an idiot asshole student for never having spoken to a counselor about how to apply:

“What colleges were even an option? How would I find out about financial aid? What did a year’s tuition cost? Would I have to live on campus, or could I commute? Was my GPA good enough? Was there testing? Where did I apply?”

But this also somehow feels entirely on brand for someone who doesn’t know the word recliner. If those passages above about the RECLINER TIM. IT’S CALLED A RECLINER! seem long just to make a point about how Tim doesn’t know what a recliner is, it’s not because Chris is paying me by the word (though I am open to the possibility), but it’s because this faux dopey Leave it to Beaver quality of Pawlenty’s “salt of the earth”, “son of the soil” shtick actually feels very genuine.

Remember that one of the defining qualities of the PPCPM is that it’s establishing the candidate’s bona fides. This includes their “authentic American patriot YEEHAW!”-ness, even in a Democratic Primary. Just look at Joe Biden from Scranton PA, even though he moved to Long Island briefly when he was four and then moved out of Scranton forever when he was ten, so the most formative years of his life where the bulk of his adult personality and remembered experiences occurred happened somewhere other than Scranton. Delaware, the home of the American insurance industry, doesn’t scream “working class” quite like Scranton, even though nobody in their right mind would look at someone who spent their entire lives from 11 onward somewhere else. Anyway, I digress.

Biden’s insistence on his working class bona fides is because the idea that Americans are by default a hardworking, labor-friendly civilization is hardwired into how we understand ourselves and our country. Or at least, it used to be. The entire façade is crumbling around us and most young people have completely fucking checked out of the myth that bootstraps are something you can actually pull on since we’re too broke to own any in the first place. But regardless, the legacy media and political establishment—and the vast majority of voters, by the way, since millennial angst expressed on the internet is not the summation of human accomplishment no matter what my LiveJournal claims—still subscribes to this political myth.

And so, every election cycle, every candidate for the highest office in the land tries to put forward whatever piece of their background speaks to that essential story.

In Pawlenty’s case, it’s entirely genuine. He was born and raised in South St. Paul, Minnesota, and didn’t leave until after college. He was a commuter student and only left when he and his wife got swanky law jobs in the Twin Cities. Unlike Biden, when Pawlenty says he’s from South St. Paul, he actually is.

“The meatpacking plants and stockyards that once thrived along the western bank of the Mississippi—once the biggest stockyards in the entire world—are gone.

“What used to serve as the center of employment and life for so many residents of this town was swept into history, seemingly overnight, at the dawn of the 1970’s. It’s something anyone in America who lives in a one-industry town, whether it’s an auto factory town or a shoe-manufacturing community, can relate to. When that one industry starts to close up shop, it leaves decades of unease and heartache in its wake.”

As a result of actually being from the place he claims to be from, Pawlenty speaks with a frankness about what de-industrialization did to South St. Paul that Biden can only ever pantomime. This is in part because Biden would not have been old enough at ten years old to understand what was happening as America offshored its industry and eviscerated the working class, and also because Biden is just so old that he moved out of Scranton while the Golden Age of the Middle Class was still happening.

As a quick point of reference to Biden’s age, the Boomer generation only lasted twenty-some years. Yet we had Boomer presidents for well over thirty. The first non-Boomer we got wasn’t some younger Gen-X model, but an even OLDER Silent Generation model. It’s like driving a 1988 Toyota Camry until it’s literally falling apart in 2019 and then upgrading to a Model T, not because you’re a Model T enthusiast, but because your Aunt Becky is convinced that buying a 2020 Prius will literally end democracy as we know it, so you can only drive a Model T or you’re a fascist. So you buy the Model T just to get her to shut the fuck up already but she won’t stop DM’ing you about it because there’s a chance the 2024 Prius will have a chance in hell at bringing this overwrought metaphor to a conclusion. If that’s not enough, remember that Kamala is still technically a Boomer and is one heart attack away from restoring that generation to the throne.

Pawlenty’s genuineness is important for two reasons. One, it actually sells him as a politician and probably has a lot to do with his success in Minnesota state politics. Secondly, it does for the rest of his memoir what that genuineness does on the campaign trail: it sells the policy. And this is where it becomes impossible to point and laugh at out of touch Republican talking points about the economy.

In any other case, pointing and laughing at Republican deficit hawks cutting taxes and then bemoaning deficits is pointless because we know they’re cynically doing this shit as a way to justify cutting down on business regulation. Republicans know they’re causing the deficit. But they also know that Democrats are cowardly shitgibbons when it comes to running defense, so they’ll cave every time and thus offer no reason for Republicans to stop. However, in Pawlenty’s case, that genuineness that he carries around with him suggests he actually believes it is sound policy based in reality.

There is not one drop of self-awareness on Pawlenty’s part when it comes to the relationship between taxation and spending and balancing the budget. He brags about cutting taxes as House Majority Leader, and then is surprised that there is a multi-billion-dollar hole in the budget projections he inherits once he’s elected governor. Time is linear for everyone except Tim. There is no rational connection between these things. He never addresses the connection. He just talks about cutting taxes in the State Legislature one moment, and then is GASP! Surprised that there’s a giant fucking hole in the budget once he’s in the governor’s mansion.

A couple of passages that really illustrate this complete lack of understanding is fairly standard for boomers writ large, but helps exemplify the fact that Pawlenty really does live in a Norman Rockwell painting:

“While I hate to reflect on it like some old man reminiscing about the good ol’ days, the world just seemed to work [in the 1960’s] in a way that allowed the people of South St. Paul, my family included, to live a pretty great life.”

And

“From everything I saw as a child, the city of South St. Paul was a place where neighbors mattered, where family mattered, where church mattered, where respect for things mattered. Everywhere you turned, you saw hardworking, fun-loving people, doing whatever they could to get by, most all of them living by the rules and trying to do the right thing.”

I wrote in the margin, “Pepperidge farm remembers!”

Boomers love to harp on contemporary complaints about working multiple jobs and not being able to afford basic housing or food. “Back in my day!” Well, no, you fungus, that was not back in your day. That was back in your parents’ day when there was an acute memory of what happens when billionaires rape the people who generate all of their wealth, and so they put into place an entire policy regime designed to minimize the power of the billionaires while funneling as much money back into people’s pockets as humanly possible. It wasn’t perfect, and was absolutely racist as fuck how the uneven distribution played out, but it was partly because of exorbitantly high taxes on the business class and regulations designed to keep them from dismantling and moving out on a whim that the 50’s and 60’s were even able to play out the way they did.

The reason boomers love to hate on taxes is because the current neoliberal regime has shifted the tax burden so severely off of businesses and onto people. Meanwhile the regulatory environment surrounding the business and its shareholders has become so disgustingly incestuous that shareholders will literally sue the board of directors for trying to give their employees raises during a global pandemic (Full disclosure: I am a former employee of NVI and a former shareholder, but did not purchase stocks during the period in question and sold the last of my shares in EYE prior to the lawsuit being announced). Boomers have a false class consciousness, where they think their interests and the interests of business owners are the same and so have unrelentingly supported this idea that releasing the shackles of business will usher in another golden age, whereas every single time we move further in that direction everything gets worse for everyone with more and more of the tax burden falling on individuals.

So hearing deficit hawks reminiscing about how great their childhoods were is always a special kind of special, since they are the ones pushing it further and further out of reach for their own children and grandchildren. Which makes the fact that Tim Pawlenty is a classic pre-Trumpian deficit hawk, and one that probably genuinely believes it without any irony whatsoever, so much more fucking grim.

It’s poetic, then, that he chose to run for President at the exact moment that the Reaganite Republican consensus was starting to break down.

The Tea Party rose to prominence beginning 2009 as a response to Obama’s election. Whatever their motives or unconscious racial bias, the Tea Party represented for the right what Occupy Wall Street did for the left—a disenfranchised, disillusioned, downwardly mobile popular mass expressing its frustrations at decades of bipartisan government mismanagement.

The difference between right populism and left populism (at least between 2009 and 2024) is that the right populists were willing to hold the government hostage to get their way, whereas the left populists have always bent the knee at the last instant. So the left populists have never understood that the entire point of gaining power is to wield it as effectively as one can, and to use every available means to do so. The Tea Party was so effective at this in the early days that it caused an institutional back lash within the Republican Party that eventually saw the isolating of some of the Tea Party’s most extreme members of Congress in the Freedom Caucus right up until Donald Trump and MAGA reinvigorated it.

Had Pawlenty played his cards differently, he maybe could have had a fighting shot at the 2012 nomination in place of Mitt “I have Binders Full of Women” Romney. Whereas Romney was widely viewed as out of touch and elitist, Pawlenty had genuine populist leanings that could have been flexed had he read the moment better. Instead, he came in third in a straw poll just before the Iowa caucuses and dropped out. And now I’m going to mathematically prove that Pawlenty is a fucking idiot for doing so.

The Republican primaries have only been run since 1976. Prior to that, the Republican Party chose its own nominee for President and didn’t let people directly influence that outcome. Since 1976, ignoring incumbent candidates, Iowa has only chosen the eventual nominee twice in 13 presidential primaries (including 2024 because we all know Haley isn’t going to win). In 2012, that was twice in ten. And the first place winner of the straw poll that made Pawlenty pack up shop wasn’t even the eventual winner of Iowa. It was straw poll fourth place winner Rick Santorum, which suggests that Pawlenty actually had a fucking shot at winning Iowa.

I’m just spitballing here, but New Hampshire has a tendency to seek a middle ground when it comes to the primaries. We saw this in the 2024 New Hampshire Primary’s lean toward Haley over Trump. Given Pawlenty’s “Aw shucks!” version of deficit hawkery, I would be willing to go out on a limb that a win in Iowa would have really boosted his chances in New Hampshire, and had he managed to pull off both of those, it would have given him a pretty decent betting chance at actually getting the nomination over Romney.

Would Pawlenty have stood a chance against Obama? Actually, yeah. Obama’s one and only success while in office was the Affordable Care Act which made healthcare more expensive for everyone. Romney couldn’t attack it since it was lovingly referred to as Romneycare due to its copying of Romney’s healthcare law while Governor of Massachusetts. However, Pawlenty could have attacked it and would have attacked it authentically. The ACA of 2012 was a paragon of government spending gone horribly wrong. The website was buggy, the open enrollment periods were (and are) nightmarish, the marketplace was difficult to navigate, and it required the hiring of thousands of new government workers to staff the phone lines which also routinely crashed.

Pawlenty would have had a field day!

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

The idiot who doesn’t know how to say “recliner”, whose four siblings forewent college educations so he could go, and former Governor of Minnesota read an informal, internal GOP poll that said the loser caucus that can’t pick a winner wasn’t going to pick him and dropped out.

In reading this, it made me think what is the benefit of reading a twelve year old memoir of a failed presidential candidate? There is no part of the reason why it was written that translates into the reason to read it now. Pawlenty’s political career in office is done. He is currently a lobbyist as near as I can tell for the Financial Services Roundtable as near as I can tell. His Xitter is just boomer small business dad, so, incredibly on brand. There’s no reason to pull out quotes from his book and yell “gotcha!”

Instead, I think the point of reading these is probably something to do with being able to look at a specific political moment, remember the specific partisan battles and the claims that these elections are too important to do anything other than vote for the centrist or else democracy will end and…maybe something deeply poignant about how the average American voter’s political memory is shorter than a goldfish?

Here are some other hilarious Pawlenty bits and the commentary I wrote in the margins:

“My family was eating breakfast one morning, discussing Greece and its financial trouble because it was in the newspaper. Mara, my then-thirteen-year-old daughter, completely unprompted, with simplicity and clarity, looked at me and said, ‘That will be America soon.’” [STFU Tim she did not say that]

“Whatever happened to the power of Enough? the power and the guts to say, ‘No’?” [Foreshadowing]

“It’s no longer okay to look backward, unless it’s to find inspiration or recognize the errors of the past so we can be certain we don’t repeat them.” [Woke!]

“The courage to say, ‘No’ when everyone else says ‘Yes’—because we know it’s the right thing to do.” [Say no to yes; say pizza to drugs]

“Stockyards and Stability” [by Jane Austen]

“My simple act of offering pro-Reagan brochures was viewed by many on campus as politically intolerable. People shouted at me, and one student actually spit at my shoes!” [This was actually because he was a giant fucking nerd; nobody actually cared about Reagan]

And let us close with the afterglow of the knowledge that Tim Pawlenty almost accepted a job for Rudy fucking Giuliani:

“[I] actually got as far as receiving a job offer from Bracewell & Patterson (now Bracewell and Giuliani), a well-respected law firm” [LOL]