Tim Pawlenty, the anti-gay former Republican Governor of Minnesota, late Sunday night posted a very Madison Avenued Google-like video on YouTube, announcing he is running for president. Pawlenty, 50, a Baptist, who claims he would reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the ban on openly-gay service members, also vetoed a bill in his home state that would have allowed surviving partners of same-sex couples the right to decide what to do with their loved one’s deceased body.
At the time, Pawlenty said he believed in “traditional marriage,” and that the bill would have “elevated” same-sex relationships. “I oppose efforts to treat domestic relationships as the equivalent of traditional marriage,†Pawlenty added.
Pawlenty in 1993 signed a same-sex friendly bill that extended protections to gays and lesbians under the state’s Human Rights Act, but later renounced it.
Pawlenty believes in adding more prisons and tougher penalties for sex offenders, reducing taxes on businesses, requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, and more oil drilling, including in AWNR.
In his presidential announcement video, you’ll notice Pawlenty says he’s not going to promise solutions, just that he’ll be honest enough to point out problems, and then says President Barack Obama lacks “courage.” There’s also a heavy use of technical effects, because, to be frank, “T-Paw,” homophobia and all, is a pretty boring guy.
“Tim Pawlenty is like the guy you’ll switch lines at Home Depot to avoid having to talk to while waiting to get to the cashier,” wrote the New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins just ten days ago, who, just a few weeks ago noted that Pawlenty’s “[l]atest book tells about a joke he pulled on a man who had just been fitted for a new hearing aid, by ‘moving my lips as if I were talking but without saying anything so he’d think something was wrong.’â€
Certainly presidential material, right?