Nick Coleman

I had a chance to chat with Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his wife, Mary Pawlenty, during the live broadcast of Tom Hauser's "At Issue" program on KSTP this morning.

One would never know that both have been on an emotional roller coaster the last week until John McCain finally made his decision last Friday.

Pawlenty remains as ebullient as ever and plans to work hard for the McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. With Minnesota Republicans' disappointment about Pawlenty being passed over as the veep candidate morphing into excitement about the ticket, there's also a sense of relief.  Pawlenty managed Minnesota's historic $4.6 billion state budget deficit crisis well in 2003, and they expect him do to the same in 2009.  Current guestimates put the state somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion short (the total biennial budget is about $32 billion), given current economic estimates. 

For more on Pawlenty, be sure to check out the September issue of Minneapolis St. Paul magazine.  Senior editor Brian Lambert had the Star Tribune's Nick Coleman and me write "competing" stories on the "secrets of Tim Pawlenty's success."  Some PIM readers may recall that Lambert and I had a radioactive radio show on KTLK several years ago.  Let me tell you that having Brian as my writing boss and editor was just as radioactive. 

Part of what was edited out (and mostly due to space constraints) was how the best way I could think of to summarize the secrets of Pawlenty's success was to think of a hamburger.

The first politician to call to mind the image of the humble hamburger was Vice President Walter Mondale.  In 1984 he was running for the Democratic nomination for president.  Then-U.S. Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), another Democratic contender, was campaigning on a slogan of "new ideas."  Much like Barack Obama's "change for America,"  Hart's new ideas were not substantively spelled out, policywise.

In a debate, Mondale, after hearing, yet again, about Hart's new ideas, leaned over the podium and said, "When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad, 'Where's the beef?'" The audience roared. Mondale clobbered Hart. 

"Where's the beef?" was the punchline in a television ad for Wendy's. The ad featured three gray-haired ladies poking at a "very big fluffy bun" with a very tiny hamburger on it. The most crotchety of the old ladies barked repeatedly, "Where's the beef?" Arguably, "Where's the beef" was the best line Mondale delivered his entire political career. Not only did it distill down a difficult political message -- that Hart was all style and no substance -- into something people could intuitively understand in a heartbeat, the line also captured the imagination of the nonpolitical popular culture. The fact that Wendy's had spent $8 million heavily saturating the airwaves with "Where's the beef?" before Mondale's political appropriation didn't hurt either.

If Mondale was a Wendy's hamburger, one with "more beef and less bun," then Pawlenty is a McDonald's Big Mac: "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun."

Pawlenty was 14 when the McDonald's Big Mac jingle was hammered into the nation's psyche. Perhaps it's only fitting that in 2008, McDonald's is reviving the jingle as a TV commercial -- but now the company is asking consumers to write their own songs using the exact words and submit entries to a contest on MySpace.com.

If Pawlenty is a Big Mac, then most people paying attention know the "two all-beef patties ... lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun" of his life story.

That story is that he's a native South St. Paul boy, the son of a truck-driver father and a homemaker mother who died of cancer when Pawlenty was 16. Pawlenty was the youngest of five siblings and is the only one to have gone to college. When Pawlenty was in high school, his father lost his job, and times were tough for the family. Pawlenty worked typical teenager jobs like delivering newspapers, and paid his own way through college and law school at the University of Minnesota.

He met his wife in law school, and the couple moved to Eagan, where they are raising two teenage daughters, Anna and Mara. Pawlenty practiced law in the private sector with a major downtown Minneapolis law firm, focusing on school district law. In 1992, he was elected to an open seat in then-reliably Republican, population-exploding Eagan. In 1998, the House Republicans gained the majority and his legislative peers elected him to be their majority leader. In 2002, Pawlenty was elected governor and was re-elected in 2006. 

While Pawlenty traveled much tougher personal and financial roads than most middle-class Minnesotans, his solid progression through professional and political ranks is the stuff of a regular hamburger politician.

But it's the special sauce that makes that hamburger a Big Mac. 

To find out what it's in Pawlenty's secret sauce, you'll have to read the September issue of Minneapolis St. Paul magazine. 

And be sure not to miss the end of the story when former state GOP party chair Ron Eibensteiner starts quoting Rudyard Kipling over a bowl of chicken soup at Zelo.

Unfortunately, my working theory of Pawlenty as Big Mac was smashed to smithereens by the governor himself. 

Pawlenty isn't particularly fond of hamburgers, whether they're McDonald's Big Macs, or Wendy's "more beef and less bun." 

He's a Taco John's guy. Pawlenty figures he's been to every Taco John's in the Twin Cities area, if not the state. His favorite is Taco Tuesdays, when "the bold, beefy, crispy, crunchy tacos are specially priced."  Not having a clue about Taco Tuesdays, I didn't think to ask how many of those bold, beefy things Pawlenty usually orders.

But what Pawlenty really loves are Taco John's Potato Oles. Pawlenty describes them as "delicious and scrumptious."  Taco John's Web site describes them as their "world-famous, crispy, golden nuggets lightly sprinkled with ... secret seasonings."

Secret sauce, secret seasonings. Same thing. 

Shame on the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman and the rest of the left who are laying the blame for the tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge on GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

We don’t even know the number--let alone the names--of people killed. Doesn’t matter to Coleman and his ilk. Take any shot to smear a Republican.

Writes Coleman:

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

"No New Taxes" has nothing to do with what happened, yesterday.

A few facts for Coleman. In general, the major bridges the federal government has built become the responsibility of states to maintain, and states routinely seek and are granted federal funding to help with the maintenance. The maintenance work being done on the I-35W bridge by Progressive Contractors, Inc., out of St. Michael, Minnesota, was on the list of projects of the 2007-2009 State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) list. Right there on page 116 of the report is the I-35W bridge. The $3.3 million price tag was being paid mostly by the federal government ($2.97 million) and not the state ($330,000).

The National Bridge Inventory conducted by the federal government in 2003 reported that the bridge had a "sufficiency" rating of 50% on a scale of 120. That’s not great, but that’s where about 80,000 of the country’s bridges stand. The significant finding of that Inventory, however, was that structurally, the bridge "meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is."

The federal government didn’t flag structural issues; neither did MnDOT.

Pawlenty could have raised the gas tax $50 a gallon and nothing would have happened. The structural condition of the bridge was not on anyone’s radar screen. At this point, that appears to be the real issue: All levels of government may have failed us.

But, specifically, Pawlenty and his administration have not. Those who blame Pawlenty and the Republicans for not raising the state’s gas tax since 1988 may want to review their legislative history. From 1988-1996, the Democrats controlled both houses of the state legislature. Transportation funding increase efforts stalemated among Democrats because urban DFLers wanted a permanent funding source for transit (the state gas tax is constitutionally dedicated to roads).

From 1996-2006, the Republicans controlled the House and the Democrats held the Senate. To be sure, "no new taxes" prevailed during those years. The last several years, the Legislature has sent funding increase packages that have been too rich in tax increases. The last one included a ten-cent gas tax increase along with an option by local governments--not the people--to raise the sales tax for transit.

These weren’t realistic packages.They were meant to embarrass the Governor.

Nevertheless, no matter how much money government has, it can’t fix a bridge that’s not on a list of bridges that need fixing.

For the record, in the 1990s, I did some work for the state’s highway construction companies. We lobbied to increase the gas tax by a nickel, and obviously, we lost. I believe the state does need to raise the gas tax (I happen to like to drive). If Democrats were serious about increasing transportation funding and not political grandstanding, they would send Pawlenty a a simple nickel increase bill. Bet he’d sign it…even before this tragedy.

Finally, thoughts and prayers to everyone at Progressive Contractors (P.C.I.). Owner Mike McGray runs a fine construction business, and from all we know at this point, it appears he lost at least one worker.

Some additional material: The I-35W bridge was completed in 1967. Many photos taken by the public have been posted on the Flickr service tagged under 'bridge collapse'. The new Minnesota 2020 thinktank quickly released a report by longtime Strib reporter Conrad deFiebre (who covered transportation) entitled "451 Minnesota Bridges 'Functionally Obsolete'."