Pawlenty’s state of the state: A little song, a little dance–and more red ink

Watching GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s 2009 state of the state address was like being wrenched back in time a year, to a moment when Pawlenty was actively auditioning for higher office and the state was not facing a projected $5 billion-plus in deficits. Comprising equal parts feel-your-pain sentimentalism and cold-blooded fiscal brinksmanship, the speech was practically bereft of details about how to close the state’s yawning fiscal abyss. In dollar terms, Minnesota’s chief executive actually proposed to dig the hole deeper.

It was as if Pawlenty took a hard look at the situation and decided the better part of valor was to ensure that he saves at least one Minnesotan–specifically, the one he sees while shaving–from long-term injury amid the chaos. The governor’s words seemed to reveal more about how he means to inoculate himself against damage to his longer-range political ambitions than about the shape of Minnesota Future. What else are we to make of a speech that devoted four or five minutes to a National Guardsman’s heroics in Iraq and a scant few seconds to the tens of thousands of Minnesotans whose health care safety net is about to be attacked with hatchets?

Pawlenty has chosen to cleave tight to his credentials as a tax and budget cutter, in the apparent faith that those politics will pass back into vogue in the not too distant future. Any speculation that he would retool along more moderate lines to suit changing political currents is hereby laid to rest. His judgment seems dubious on its face, but we’ll see. Whatever else might be said of him, Pawlenty has rarely been wrong in calculating his political self-interest up to now.

In bottom-line terms, Pawlenty’s proposals to cut the state’s corporate tax in half while offering a raft of other business tax cuts and credits, and to simultaneously beef up portions of the education budget, will certainly add to the whopping deficit that the Legislature is charged with erasing. At the DFL’s post-address press conference, House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher said her party’s preliminary estimate of the additional costs of those measures ran in the $1 billion range.

That’s not an authoritative estimate, but neither is the purported $5 billion shortfall for the coming biennium. In recent days there have been rumblings at the Capitol and around the state that the figure may rise as high as $7 billion owing to an economy that has declined faster and more sharply than forecasters expected. The worst case is thus around $8 billion in needed cuts if Pawlenty gets his way, or roughly 25 percent of the entire state budget.

On the proposed savings side, Pawlenty has a duffel full of salutary-sounding ideas for saving money–partnering with other states to save money on bulk purchases, reducing the duplication of services by 87 county governments across the state–but they amount to nickels and dimes in the near term. Nominally, at least, he’s got ideas for growing the economy. But his "green jobs" proposal amounts to a large-scale expansion of Pawlenty’s largely fruitless JOBZ program, which was essentially branded a failure in a legislative auditor’s report from a year ago.

Considering the magnitude of the crisis, this is awfully thin gruel.

Near the beginning of his speech, Pawlenty quoted Winston Churchill: "If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future." But there is another famous Churchill remark that better captures the spirit and point of the governor’s state of the state message: "There is nothing quite as exhilarating as being shot at and missed." When the time comes for Pawlenty to shuffle off the governorship and try moving on to bigger things, that is precisely what he hopes to be able to say of the 2009-10 budget wars.