Quotes of the Day

It was after 8 p.m. at the public library in the quiet town of Adel, Iowa, and staffers were folding up the metal chairs. Tim Pawlenty's question-and-answer session had wrapped up some 30 minutes earlier, but a handful of voters were still here, and therefore so was Pawlenty, tall and lean in his dark suit, staying as always until no one was left to talk with him. When the polls show you in the low single digits, you make time for everyone.

Presently, one middle-aged man in a blazer was telling Pawlenty why Republicans need a tough-talking presidential candidate like Donald Trump. "We need to be bold," he implored. Conservatives were going to be attacked in 2012, and they had to be willing to fight back hard. Was Pawlenty up to it?

The candidate smiled patiently, crinkling the crow's-feet around his eyes. He'd heard this before. "Don't confuse being loud with being strong," Pawlenty told him. The man began to protest — something about threatening to shoot illegal immigrants at the border — but Pawlenty gently interrupted him. Republicans had to pick their fights wisely, he said. "You and I already agree with each other. The question is, The people we need to get — how do they respond? We need to reach out and get new people to join the team."

That, in a nutshell, is the dilemma facing Tim Pawlenty as he launches his campaign for the GOP nomination. Conservative activists want a political ninja to kickbox his way to the White House. There's a reason a brash loudmouth like Trump was a brief Republican sensation this spring. But that's not Tim Pawlenty, he of the Minnesota-nice demeanor and goofy sense of humor. His appeal is in the middle, not the margin. He's smart, likable and decent and, as the blue collar son of a truck driver, has a powerful American story to tell. He cut taxes and reined in spending in his two terms as governor of Minnesota, proving himself a solid conservative but not a fanatical ideologue. Those credentials have earned him the respect of Republican insiders. But poll after poll shows that he's yet to catch on with voters.

But in a strange way, the stars could be aligning for Pawlenty. It's been said that the 2012 Republican campaign has been a gong show, featuring more dropouts than volunteers. (Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour and Trump have all stepped back in recent weeks, and Sarah Palin is a question mark at best.) After months of uncertainty, the GOP field seems to have congealed around a handful of candidates who could plausibly win the nomination: Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman and the consensus front runner, Mitt Romney. "Pawlenty is a very credible candidate for the nomination," says former GOP chairman Ed Gillespie. "I would not be surprised if at the end of the day it comes down to him and somebody else." In an unusually weak 2012 Republican field, it's just possible that Tim Pawlenty will be the last Republican standing.

An Unlikely Politician
"I can win the election," Tim Pawlenty says. It is April 15, and he is at a roadside diner near Concord, N.H., a couple of hours before he is scheduled to address a tax-day Tea Party rally outside the state capitol. The 50-year-old Pawlenty has a chipper manner, and he smiles as he explains over a cup of black coffee how he can replace Barack Obama.

"I think I'm the one candidate in the race who can unite and excite the whole conservative movement and the Republican Party," he says, arguing that he can appeal at once to conservatives focused on social issues, the budget and national security. "I think most of the other candidates are going to appeal to one of those buckets. But I can appeal to all of them deeply and authentically, and I've got the record to back it up."

And in a general election against Obama? "I have an interesting and helpful and compelling personal story that defies the Republican stereotype," he says. "Given my blue collar background, given my record as governor, given the things I've accomplished ... I can make a connection with people and market our message effectively and lead effectively."

It may seem odd to talk about authenticity in nearly the same breath as marketing. But that's the Pawlenty problem: he tries so hard to make the case for his authenticity that he can sound, well, inauthentic.

A case in point was Pawlenty's early effort to introduce himself with a dramatic online video in January. In the clip, Pawlenty speaks about American greatness and "putting our heads down and getting it done" over quick-cut images of a moon landing, Martin Luther King, soaring fighter jets and the lower Manhattan skyline, all to a sound track of swelling strings and booming sound effects. It felt like a blockbuster movie trailer — with Steve Carell playing the lead.

If Pawlenty projects an exaggerated air of confidence, perhaps it's to make up for a certain lack of gravitas. This is a man whose first professional goal was to be a dentist. Who as governor grew out his sideburns in part as a tribute to the character of Ricky Bobby from the Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights. Who once told a Minnesotan who'd asked if he was the governor that he was in fact the Channel 4 weatherman. (He could pass for one.) And who, during a 2001 statehouse baseball game, yanked down the pants of his buddy Steve Sviggum, then the statehouse speaker. "The governor was a prankster," Sviggum says.

Self-important he is not. Pawlenty jokes that when he first announced he was running for governor to replace pro wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura, his young daughters' friends were thrilled — but not about him: "Can you get us Jesse Ventura's autograph?" they asked.

And when I ask Pawlenty, during a second interview in Des Moines, Iowa, exactly when he decided he was up to the grand challenge of the presidency, he answers in less than grandiose terms, explaining how he'd set up a political-action committee in 2009. I try again, saying I am curious about when he first imagined himself worthy of the history books, ready to send soldiers to their deaths and endure the national stage's harsh toll. "I don't know," he replies. "I wish I had a good answer for you on that." Pawlenty says it is not an idea that crossed his mind 15 or 20 years ago but that as he considered life as a relatively young ex-governor, he felt obliged not to take the easy path and "go make some money and play hockey and drink beer." He adds that he almost didn't run at all. "Mary and I talked about this at length, and many times, and it was a close call," he says, mentioning his wife of 24 years. He adds with a laugh, "It could have gone the other way for all the reasons you're suggesting."

Biography as a Platform
Of course, appearing hyperambitious for the presidency can be a liability. And in a sense, the presidential circus first came to Pawlenty, not the other way around. He may have gotten the White House bug in the summer of 2008, when his name was floated as a potential running mate for John McCain. The speculation put Pawlenty on the national radar. And although McCain, looking to shake up the race, chose Palin instead, the logic for Pawlenty was compelling: he was an articulate conservative from a region where Republicans have lost their electoral grip (and was said to have that quality so crucial in a running mate: a skeleton-free closet).

The McCain team was also drawn to Pawlenty's life story, which could have helped confound the image of Republicans as the party of the privileged. Pawlenty has long argued that the GOP must remind Americans that they're "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club." He grew up in South St. Paul, a blue collar town fragrant from the nearby stockyards and meatpacking plants. He was one of five siblings in a pro-union Catholic family. His father, Eugene Pawlenty — the name is Polish — was a truck driver who worked side jobs on weekends. (Including one cleaning meat hooks: "I tossed my cookies" at the stench when helping out one weekend, Pawlenty has recalled.)

In the 1970s, the meatpacking jobs dried up; his father would eventually lose his. Worse, Pawlenty's mother succumbed to ovarian cancer when he was just 16. On her deathbed, she insisted that Tim be the first in the family to attend college. He put himself through the University of Minnesota by working in a grocery store.

That story is crucial to Pawlenty's appeal, his supporters argue. "The guy has a genuine connection to average people," says his friend Vin Weber, a former Republican Congressman from Minnesota. "Every candidate I know tries to establish some roots in what I call real-world middle America. A lot of them have to invent it. With Tim Pawlenty, it's real. He is not a person who has lost his connection to the working-class folks he grew up with."

Inspired by Ronald Reagan, Pawlenty gravitated to politics in college, volunteering with the College Republicans. He went on to law school, where he met Mary, a graduate of a Christian college who would eventually convert him to Evangelicalism. Meanwhile, he climbed the local political ladder, managing a winning 1988 GOP Senate campaign and getting elected to the state legislature, where he became the GOP leader before his 2002 bid for governor.

Pawlenty likes to boast that he, more than any other candidate, will run on his record. It's a none-too-subtle contrast with Romney, who isn't exactly putting his Massachusetts health care reform front and center. And it's true that Pawlenty governed as a conservative in the state that produced Walter Mondale and that hasn't voted Republican for President since 1972. "He managed to take the anger — the snarl, if you will — out of the hard-core social and economic extremist-conservative agenda," says Dane Smith, a former reporter who covered Pawlenty for years.

As governor, Pawlenty brought a return to normality and a conservative style. He removed from the governor's mansion a portrait of Ventura in knight's armor on a white horse and replaced it with one of an old man praying, and he imported his foosball table from home. Ventura had left behind a $4.5 billion deficit, which Pawlenty closed not by raising taxes (which he would slash by $800 million over the course of his term) but by dramatically slowing spending. He vetoed dozens of Democratic tax-hike bills, and in 2005 he allowed a nine-day state-government shutdown rather than give in to the Democrats' budget demands.

He also picked fights with the liberal establishment. In 2005, Pawlenty set out to cut the generous pension benefits of the state's mass-transit workers' union, triggering a 44-day strike before the union cried uncle. "Pawlenty ought to be getting extra credit for having faced down public-employee unions ... before it was cool," one National Review writer recently noted. On social issues, Pawlenty approved tough new abortion restrictions and gave local school boards the freedom to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. Says Lawrence Jacobs, a professor of politics at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs: "Pawlenty is probably the most conservative governor in Minnesota's history."

To Pawlenty, there's no higher compliment. And, he adds, "if we can do it in my state, we can do it anywhere."

A Little Help from Obama
A closer look reveals a more complicated story. Critics say Pawlenty used accounting shortcuts, like postponing spending and accelerating revenue collection, to balance budgets. Today, Minnesota is struggling with a projected budget deficit of $5 billion, which some blame on Pawlenty. "I don't think any governor has left behind a worse financial mess than he has," says Arne Carlson, a Republican who was Minnesota's governor from 1991 to 1999.

Not my fault, Pawlenty replies, blaming the recession, Democratic spending habits and a state supreme court ruling that restored $2.7 billion he'd slashed from the budget by fiat in 2009. (The ruling, written by a chief justice whom Pawlenty appointed, found that the unilateral cut had exceeded the governor's authority.) But he tends not to mention the help he got from nonconservative sources — including more than $2 billion from an Obama stimulus bill that he has trashed as "largely wasted" and a 75 cents cigarette-tax hike he swallowed to end that 2005 budget shutdown. "That was disappointing," says Grover Norquist, the president of the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform (who adds that Pawlenty "did a good job" overall on fiscal issues.)

Pawlenty will also have to explain to conservatives his stint of activism on global warming, which in 2007 he called "one of the most important [issues] of our time." He signed bills promoting clean energy and a cap-and-trade system of carbon limits similar to the model envisioned by Obama. He toured the state with the Minnesota-based Arctic explorer Will Steger to "convince the skeptics," as he put it, and even considered visiting the Arctic. He made a 2008 radio ad urging Congress to "cap greenhouse-gas pollution now!" But he now takes it all back, saying the human impact on climate change is unproven. "It was a mistake, and I'm sorry," Pawlenty said in a May 6 Fox News debate, leaving it to others to judge whether his mind was changed by the science or by growing skepticism among Republicans.

For Pawlenty, these blemishes are less important than his professed ability to win in places where other Republicans cannot. "I got elected and re-elected in a blue state as a movement conservative," Pawlenty told me, adding that he could tilt states like Pennsylvania, Colorado, Ohio and Florida back into the red. This too oversimplifies the record. Pawlenty was no electoral Kirby Puckett. He won both his statewide races with less than 50% of the vote. He was barely re-elected, by 21,000 votes, in 2006. In each race, the presence of a third-party candidate likely fractured the state's mostly Democratic voters to his advantage. "I'm quite confident that Pawlenty would not have been elected if it was a straight-up vote between a Democrat and a Republican," says the University of Minnesota's Jacobs. Last fall, Pawlenty's handpicked GOP successor, for whom he campaigned, was defeated. And at least one recent poll has shown Pawlenty running behind Obama in the state, calling into question whether he could really deliver Minnesota's 10 electoral votes to the GOP next November.

Too Nice to Win?
In close quarters, Pawlenty is a skilled retail performer. But he's still far from an electrifying speaker. "If you looked up boring in the dictionary," comedian Seth Meyers cracked at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in April, "that'd be more exciting than listening to Tim Pawlenty." During a long riff on entitlement reform in Adel, Pawlenty sensed correctly that he might be losing his audience: "I know some of you just had supper and so you might be dozing off on me. I need you to stay with me here," he said.

At times he overcompensates. Before larger crowds, Pawlenty speaks with an urgent inflection that sounds unnatural to some longtime observers; some even detected mysterious hints of a Southern accent during a February address he gave in Iowa. (His advisers say anyone new to the national stage needs time to find his voice.)

He has also amped up his rhetoric. Pawlenty calls Obama's 2009 health care reform law "one of the worst pieces of legislation passed in the modern history of the country" and has defended the (overblown) warnings about "death panels" in the health law, describing opponents' fears as "not irrational." In a recent interview with the comedian Dennis Miller, he cracked that Obama, who he says is "in over his head" on national security, might want to wear adult diapers to his intelligence briefings. "He's been giving away the best thing he's got going for him, and that is his genuine nice nature," says an aide to a rival GOP candidate. "There really is nothing worse than seeing a guy feigning anger at these Tea Party rallies."

Pawlenty may be spooked in part by a fellow Minnesotan: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, whose fiery brand of conservatism could steal the show in Iowa, where Pawlenty needs a strong showing to catapult him into subsequent primary states. "Bachmann's going to be a pain in the ass in Iowa," says Pawlenty's friend and former chief of staff Charlie Weaver.

Still, there's only so far Pawlenty can force it. At the tax-day rally in Concord, the audience cheered Pawlenty's list of what he said were Obama's broken campaign promises as well as his stock wisecracks about the President's cult of celebrity ("He's proven that someone can deserve a Nobel Prize less than Al Gore"). But his reception was topped by the hoots and hollers that greeted pizza mogul Herman Cain's outrageous one-liners.

Ultimately, Pawlenty may be too darn nice for the in-your-face politics his party's base craves. In his 2006 re-election race, he described himself as the "nice guy" running against a "street fighter," but Tea Party activists of this cycle are likely to wish it were the other way around. He declined to criticize two potential rivals at a recent debate on the grounds that they weren't there to defend themselves. When he bashes Obama's policies, he often prefaces his criticisms by saying, "With all due respect to President Obama ..." And while friends insist he's a fierce competitor, it's all relative: "Don't take him on in foosball," says Sviggum. "You will lose."

Pawlenty rejects the idea that he lacks toughness: "Usually the biggest mouths and the people who try to draw the most attention to themselves are actually some of the weakest." His record in Minnesota could do the talking, he said. "Other people can talk about being tough, but I've actually done it. And it isn't about being the craziest, loudest, most celebrity-oriented person. It's about whether you have the courage not just to talk but to get things done and stand in the gap and get results. And that's what I've done."

The Alternative to Romney?
Of course, the man Pawlenty needs to overtake to win the nomination — Mitt Romney — is hardly a savage political warrior himself. And while elements of Pawlenty's record may give conservatives pause, nothing is likely to cause him the kind of grief Romney is suffering for the health care bill he signed as Massachusetts governor, which many Republicans consider an unforgivable precursor to Obamacare. Knocking off Romney, in other words, might be less about toughness than about being the most plausible alternative if Republicans decide they can't stomach the titular front runner. (Huntsman, another possible alternative, has a record riddled with conservative heresies. And Gingrich's debut this month has been a p.r. fiasco.) But to get to that point, Pawlenty has to find a way to make himself heard — without compromising his vaunted Joe Six-Pack authenticity.

His advisers hope that can happen naturally. "He gets ripped for not being Mr. Charisma," says Weaver. "But what you see is what you get. I think that's what voters want these days. They might be willing to sacrifice a little glitz for someone who's real and can accomplish things." And if Republicans don't insist on a street-fighting candidate, it's always possible that the nicest guy will finish first.

This article originally appeared in the May 30, 2011, issue of TIME.

• Michael Crowley / Des Moines