From NRO: Your Pawlenty wake-up call

Perhaps the "missing piece" is in place. From Stanley Kurtz in National Review Online:

I've never bought into the silly stereotype that conservatives are stupid, at least not until watching the GOP's recent handling of its own presidential field. Granted, the first debate featured some minor players with no serious chance of victory, and some of the more prominent candidates are laboring under serious political handicaps. But Tim Pawlenty is a great candidate. It's just plain nuts not to see this, emphasize it, and take advantage of it. Instead of pining away for Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, or Scott Walker to enter the race, why not wake up and recognize that Tim Pawlenty has already got everything the GOP is looking for — with two successful gubernatorial terms worth of experience to boot. What's not to like?

Tim Pawlenty has already beaten the Democrats in a government shut-down battle. He's defeated public-employee unions in a high-stakes strike. He was regularly rated as one of the most fiscally conservative governors in the nation. And he managed to do it all in a blue state. Pawlenty is Scott Walker with experience. It's just that nobody knows it because Pawlenty’s clashes with his state's public unions and big Democratic spenders happened some time ago. If anything, Pawlenty ought to be getting extra credit for having faced down public-employee unions and profligate Democratic legislators before it was cool. Are we really so dense — so utterly dependent on the latest news cycle — that we are going to let a major opportunity like Pawlenty slip away out of the misplaced worry that he’s got "no name recognition?"

That is a solvable problem…He's tough on defense, conservative on social issues, and well-liked by people from both sides of the aisle. He's faced down Democrats time and again and won. He's got the biography of a lunch-bucket Democrat and the outlook of a fiscally conservative Republican. And he can win!

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