TPM shares this bit from the GOP debate:

This is another aspect of what I was talking about earlier. Pawlenty simply isn’t a top-tier candidate, and his performance here does indeed show substantial weakness, as Josh Marshall says. This sort of question is one of the oldest in the book, asking if you stand by your campaign’s attacks–it’s literally a gotcha question–and Pawlenty seems to lack the awareness of what’s going on, trying to stay on message. But this sort of format requires some level of flexibility with dissemination of talking points. Pawlenty has none. It looks as though he’s afraid to hit Romney when he’s in the room. My earlier posts on Pawlenty not really building up buzz within or without his state was not entirely about the size of his state so much as the political skills he honed there. During Hillary Clinton’s tenure in the Senate, a lot of New Yorkers liked the work she did in office and found her political skills compelling. She was highly regarded as a result. Not too many people were arguing that Pawlenty was such a smooth and natural politician when he was running Minnesota and it comes out very obviously here.

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  1. richard says:

    Loser! 4 more years.

  2. Rupert Psmith says:

    The best part of this was the look on Mittens face when he realized Pawlenty wasn’t going to engage him and thus would come off as weak. In the macho games that Republicans like to play T-Paw dropped his grenade on his own lap. On a side note, I’m starting to think Andy Card is the most useless political commentator of all time.

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