Hard on the heels of the (swiftly denied, but totally plausible) report that Team Romney isn’t even vetting Marco Rubio as a potential running mate comes a Wall Street Journal report that Tim Pawlenty’s star is rising in Romneyland:
Meantime, attention increasingly is turning to Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and onetime Romney primary-season foe. Of elected officials who joined Mr. Romney in a recent six-state campaign tour, Mr. Pawlenty stood out to party leaders as they handicapped who might be chosen to join the GOP ticket.
Privately, some Romney campaign officials have offered that Mr. Pawlenty has impressed them with his work as a Romney representative on the campaign trail and with the press. “He’s never done a bad interview” while acting as a campaign spokesman, said one Republican operative.
Moreover, Mr. Pawlenty’s background as the son of a truck driver from South St. Paul, Minn., is a potential counterweight to Mr. Romney’s wealth. The former governor also could help Mr. Romney in the battleground states of Minnesota and neighboring Iowa, both of which the campaign sees as potential pickups from President Barack Obama’s 2008 column.
If the Romney campaign wants to pick Pawlenty on a “first, do no harm” basis, as the candidate least likely to embarrass on the stump or have unexpected skeletons rattling his closet, then that would be a defensible move, and one that would be entirely of a piece with Romney’s overall strategy of caution. But if Romney picks Pawlenty in order to make an identity-politics play for blue collar votes in the suddenly up-for-grabs Upper Midwest, he’ll be risking making the same mistake that the McCain campaign made with Sarah Palin, and that Pawlenty himself made when he competed unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination last year: Assuming that an appeal based on identity is a substitute for an appeal based on substance.
Both Palin and Pawlenty have profiles that fit the white, downscale constituency that Republicans probably need to consolidate in order to defeat Barack Obama. Both came to national politics equipped with home-state records that had significant populist appeal. But as national candidates, their messages were deeply conventional, all movement-conservative talking points with none of the creativity they’d shown at the state level. Palin could blame the deeply-uncreative McCain campaign for this, but Pawlenty had no one to blame but himself. Here the contrast between his stillborn presidential campaign and more successful “blue collar” forays by Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum is particularly striking: Pawlenty essentially tried to run as the supply-sider’s supply-sider on policy, whereas both Huckabee and Santorum recognized (albeit, yes, without offering much detail or rigor) that a populist style needs at least some populist substance.
If Romney is hoping to win this election in the states where Santorum gave him a run for his money in the primaries, he should ponder that contrast and act accordingly. As a friend put it to me today, it’s not who you are but what you say, and just having a truck driver’s son on the ticket isn’t going to overcome (justifiable) working class skepticism about the Republican economic message unless that truck driver’s son is given an effective economic message to push.