Power

Pawlenty Could Be Vice President — If Santa Will Let Him Campaign

A Colbert joke could give Pawlenty more name recognition than his presidential run ever did.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was one of the first candidates to jump into the 2012 Republican presidential rac–and one of the first out. The idea of the somewhat boring, non-descript former governor of a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in decades somehow adding anything to a Mitt Romney presidential ticket is fairly laughable.

Maybe that is why Stephen Colbert is making his own jokes about it. The question is if those jokes could give a V.P. nomination some legs.

On last night’s “Colbert Report,” the faux conservative host “vandalized” the former presidential candidate’s wikipedia page to “boost” his electability. According to Minnesota Public Radio:

Colbert told his audience he was changing the page to read that Pawlenty was the son of “Mrs. Butterworth” and that Pawlenty “started his career in Santa’s workshop,” among other things. Finally the political satirist said he wrote, “On August 10, 2012 Tim Pawlenty was named Mitt Romney’s running mate.”

That is probably the closest Pawlenty will come to being Romney’s running mate. Pawlenty’s “Wal-Mart Republican” demeanor could serve as a nice counter to the claims that Romney is out of touch with everyday Americans, but the Minnesotan’s lack of fire is unlikely to be an asset for a position the  major responsibility of which is acting as campaign attack dog on the trail.

That may be a good thing for the women of the United States. As governor, Tim Pawlenty was instrumental in efforts to undermine a woman’s right to choose whether or not to be pregnant. Under his tenure, the state put the Women’s Right to Know Act into effect, requiring waiting periods before an abortion could be obtained, and forcing a woman to view politically-biased “informed consent” material which claims that abortions cause breast cancer (dis-proven) or that a fetus can feel pain (also dis-proven). It was the insistence on “fetal pain” as a factor that provided a foothold for other states to pass their 20-week abortion bans.

Pawlenty also signed into law the “Positive Alternatives” Act, which funnels taxpayer funds to mostly religious-based crisis pregnancy centers in the guise of providing women with assistance to continue their unwanted pregnancies.

Pawlenty became even more vocally anti-choice when running for president, reaffirming repeatedly his belief that life begins at conception and should be protected from the moment of fertilization, signing the Susan B. Anthony List pledge to “protect life from conception to natural death.”

Come to think of it, maybe a Pawlenty vice presidency isn’t that funny after all.