Who supports Pawlenty these days?

Small town, outstate Minnesota is widely seen as Republican these days, with only those darn liberal strongholds around the larger cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester and Duluth truly Democrat. So it's interesting to find an editorial in the Ely, Tower and Cook Timberjay newspapers lambasting Pawlenty.

Today's Timberjay editorial says in part:

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.

The federal government does exactly the same thing when its available revenues don’t meet its spending plans. It issues Treasury bonds to cover the shortfall, and the cost of current spending is paid for by adding to the nation’s longstanding debt.

Pawlenty says he now wants to do that here in Minnesota. Now we can certainly argue about whether the state’s prohibition on deficit spending is a good thing, particularly in tough economic times, when most economists believe running government deficits is useful. But Pawlenty isn’t making that argument. In fact, he’s made considerable political hay chiding Washington for its own growing deficits, due in large part to the stimulus funds that have helped the states, including Minnesota, stave off the worst effects of the recession.

Pawlenty clearly isn’t content with mere doubletalk here - he’s speaking from both sides of his mouth while his hands are dealing three card monty. Hypocrisy is a term that just doesn’t do it justice.

Calling the proposal unconstitutional, the paper goes on to explain the problems with Pawlenty's plan, and how it's likely Pawlenty will be back asking for more deficit spending in the future. They also place blame for the cause of the state's financial trouble squarely on Pawlenty's shoulders:

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.

It's commendable that the Timberjay editorial gets the whole story right - it's not just Pawlenty's time in the governor's office where he's done harm, but the many years in the State House where he pushed through bad financial policies.

I don't know the political persuasion of the editorial writer or writers at the Timeberjay, but I've got to imagine the general tenor of political discourse in the newspaper's circulation area to be traditional conservative. That might mean they're not fond of modern day self-labled Republicans who have stolen the party from true conservatives. Perhaps I'm going out on a log here. But the final sentences of the editorial certainly seem to indicate a lack of belief in Pawlenty as a conservative:

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?