It’s primary election day here in Minnesota, and the field is full of choices for both Republicans and Democrats. One Republican choice for governor is unsurprisingly former governor Tim Pawlenty, who is running against the Republican Party endorsed candidate.
I recently received some campaign literature from the Pawlenty campaign. In it, Pawlenty claims to have balanced the Minnesota budget as governor, after being handed a budget deficit. Apparently Pawlenty thinks only kids who were not around then or old folks with poor memories will be reading his campaign literature, because the rest of us know the claim to be a complete lie.
Let me quote from a 2009 editorial† from the Timberjay, a newspaper published in northern Minnesota:
The budget plan that the governor has proposed includes a deficit of approximately $1 billion, even after nearly $2 billion in federal stimulus funding is included. The governor proposes to address that deficit by issuing bonds, which will supposedly be repaid through future proceeds from the state’s tobacco settlement. With interest, the bonds will require payment of a total of $1.7 billion over 20 years.
…
There is, of course, a very simple reason behind the governor’s deficit spending. His reckless “no-new-taxes” pledge in conjunction with tax policy changes he backed as House Majority Leader, have left the state with an essentially permanent budget deficit.
…
Pawlenty now proposes to deal with the situation he helped create by longterm borrowing that will only exacerbate the problem for future state leaders by stealing future revenues to pay for operational spending today. What we have is a governor who claims the mantle of fiscal conservatism while proposing the most fiscally damaging solution to a state budget crisis since the founding of the state.
And he has the guts to call Washington irresponsible?
That’s pretty damning, in my book. Even more so when one realizes the region in which the Timberjay is published is generally conservative, and not a Democrat stronghold.
The Timberjay editorial staff hasn’t gotten to like Pawlenty much more over the years. On July 18 of this year, they wrote another scathing article, saying:
A former governor with an abysmal record seeks an encore. Voters should say, “No thanks.”
You can read it online here: http://timberjay.com/stories/pawlenty-weve-had-plenty,14225?
There’s endless evidence that Pawlenty was a dishonest, double-talking and generally bad governor. I may be motivated to dig up more of it, if he makes it past the primary.
†The Timberjay site no longer has a copy of this editorial, but the quoted portions can be found on this blog post from 2009: http://middlebrow_mn.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-supports-pawlenty-these-days.html
