Tim Pawlenty Quotes
You can stick a fork in Barack Obama. Politically, he's done. The main way we can screw this up is if we choose the wrong Republican.
Pawlenty, Tim. Speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. C-SPAN, 4 Jun. 2011.
This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.
Timothy James Pawlenty is an American businessman and politician. A Republican, he served as the 39th governor of Minnesota from 2003 to 2011. From 1993 to 2003, he served in the Minnesota House of Representatives, where he was majority leader for two terms. In 2011, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination and was subsequently a leading contender to be Mitt Romney's running mate before serving as co-chair of Romney's campaign.
