Pawlenty more dangerous than you think

Media pundits, even middle-of-the-road (or "Center Right," as the Right likes to mythologize) news reporters like PBS NewsHour (last night) are writing off former MN governor Tim Pawlenty as a serious contender. This is based on the fact that he wimped out the night before last at the first Republican presidential debate for the 2012 primaries. Pawlenty had coined a catchy phrase earlier in the week that hit competitor Mitt Romney: he called health care programs "Obamneycare." Now this sounds like a sharp-tongued, sassy, smart right hook. But when Jon King, the CNN moderator of the debate, brought it up, Pawlenty acted like he had never said it.
This was because Romney was standing right there next to him. This is something you should know about how things are done in Minnesota, and I think also in other prairie states like Iowa, the Dakotas and maybe into Kansas. But in Minnesota more than anywhere else.
It's "MINNESOTA NICE." People here ACT very nice and polite and often even friendly (though more often, just polite and mildly "nice" rather than actively friendly). But as soon as they get behind your back or the wheel of their car, they become sniping, backbiting, backstabbing, petty, small-minded little shits.
There is a general acknowledgment here in Minnesota that "passive aggressiveness" is a regional norm. But as soon as you try to confirm this with specific examples or generalizations about behavioral patterns or social norms, they beat you down into the ground and snuff you out. Criticism is not allowed. You are immediately branded a "whiner" and scorned and excluded from business opportunities and quietly blacklisted.
It's the quiet part that makes it so insidious. If they ever told you to your face that they didn't like you or didn't approve of whatever, and gave you a chance to argue your case or correct misperceptions, like happens in other parts of the country (including Milwaukee and Chicago--underscoring the distinction between "Midwest" and "Prairie" or "Great Plains"), you could stomach it. But they do not. They just smile politely and proceed to skewer you without you knowing it until it is much too late to respond in any useful way.
After growing up in Milwaukee and having enough exposure to Chicago (where my aunt lived) as a kid, and then moving to Minneapolis and living here for almost all my adult life, I could give an expert and detailed depiction of "Minnesota Nice" and the passive aggression that forms the basis of much of this culture. The culture shock when I first moved here was massive! I was surprised that a place only 365 miles from home could be so drastically different.
For now, my only reason for bringing this up is that we now have another right-wing candidate for U.S. president who poses a real threat of succeeding in completing the partly accomplished total demolition of the constitutional government and all social programs designed to mitigate the "survival of the fittest" effects of the exploitive economic system that currently predominates in this country and most of the world.
People should not underestimate the possibility that Pawlenty's slimy, backhanded tactics could win out in the foreseeable future. Maybe not this year but in another four or eight years. He is pretty young, and the country has consistently moved more and more in the direction of small-minded, backwater outposts like Minnesota in many respects. Yes, I said Minnesota is in many ways small-minded. I know the reputation is that we are "progressive," but that is just one more myth promulgated here, along with the notion that the natives are "nice." Yes, we had Humphrey and Mondale...that was awhile ago, did you notice? And Wellstone was something of an anomalie. Some may like to romanticize Jesse Ventura as progressive, but that is a joke. Look at his positions, and more importantly look at his failure as a governor, the fact that his only real reason for wanting the position was (like Sarah Palin) to be able to aggrandize and enrich himself personally.
In more recent years, Minnesota has spawned some of the worst right-wing assholes in the universe, and they are not anomalies, they were elected and re-elected comfortably in most cases: Michele Bachmann stands out as the most recent obvious example, but there have been many, many others. U.S. Senator Rudy Perpich, U.S. Senator Norm Coleman, Gov. Pawlenty, other Republican governors, state legislators, etc., etc. etc. The mantra that we are "progressive" is one of those many symptoms of a perverse sort of superiority complex that is best summed up by the Prairie Home Companion's intro, "where all the children are above average."
Thirty-five years ago, I never imagined that the rest of the country would move in the direction of becoming more and more like Minnesota is culturally. Bland, banal, boring. Repressive to the extreme. Obsessed with "tone" and determined to enforce political correctness and the fear of "offending" above all other social priorities. Back then, in Milwaukee and Chicago, friends of mine were amazed that I was suspended from my job as political cartoonist for the Minnesota Daily for some very harmless, minor, non-threatening, funny guerrilla theater (about seven minutes worth) in response to the most extreme Right-wing preacher in the world, Jed Smock, when he descended on the University of Minnesota. The notion of free speech was still considered the norm everywhere but here.
There are many, many changes that have occurred in the past 35 years that have seen the U.S. move in the direction of the Great Plains culture that is probably best illustrated in the books of Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt and Main Street. Read those works and ask yourself whether America as a whole hasn't become more and more like the petty, snippy, sneaky gossips and back-biters of those books. Or at least watch the film "Fargo" again, for some idea of where Minnesota was ahead of the country in its reactionary cultural aspects.
I think we are still headed for a more Minnesota-like culture nationwide, and that in that environment, Pawlenty could be just the slimeball to win.