Gov. Tim Pawlenty tap danced skillfully across a series of minefields last night at the U of M’s Ted Mann Concert Hall.

Ugh, what an awful lede. What I’m trying to say is that “Meet the Press” moderator David Gregory was in Mpls Thursday to interview the guv in front of a sold-out and mostly hostile audience. In the liberal fantasy of how such an encounter might go, Pawlenty, forced to give full answers and face follow-up questions from a prepared, skilled and fairly tough interviewer, would be unable to paper over the inconsistencies and logical contradictions of contemporary conservatism/Republicanism.

But Pawlenty never stumbled. Whether TPaw “papered over” the afore-mentioned inconsistencies or just demonstrated the coherence of Pawlentyism would be in the eye of the beholder. The hour flew by with very little news being committed. In the latter portion of the hour Pawlenty faced mostly hostile questions from the audience, including one that accused him of a being a haughty, uncompromising bully who seems to think he is "the only adult in the room." But Pawlenty stayed cool and fairly substantive in his replies.

'Creeping tyranny'

Here’s one good example. Gregory quoted a previous Pawlenty statement to the effect that Obamaism consists of “creeping tyranny.” Really? Gregory asked, “creeping tyranny?” How do you justify this kind of "revolution talk?" Replied Pawlenty:

"The more the government does, the more it usurps traditional space in the private economy.

"So If I took a dollar from you, David — this is what government does — I’m extracting a dollar from you, in the form of taxes.  I’m the government. I take it from you, subtract 20 or 30 percent for overhead, because I’m going to manage, squirrel around, do compliance checks, audits, bureaucracy and the like.

"Then I’m going to redeploy your dollar back into the economy at say 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, based on a politicized agenda or a politicized set of priorities. That’s a model of decision-making that’s not efficient. It’s political, plus, it’s not growth. So what I mean by that is: You were gonna spend your dollar anyhow. Your dollar in your pocket was gonna buy you dinner that night. Was gonna pay for your kids’ college. You might’ve bought a car. You might’ve bought an iTunes, who knows? But your  dollar was gonna circulate in the economy.

"The notion that the federal government is gonna take money from you or anybody here, bring that into government and send that back out and declare that to be economic growth is a flawed decision-making. It’s what the economist call substitution or transference effects.

"But the more corrosive part of it is, if you take that to an extreme, and it happens in increments, you take away entrepreneurial spirit; you take away individual responsibility; you take away the need for people to be innovative and industrious.

"If you look at the recent comparisons between Greece and Turkey in terms of the culture of their people as it relates to entrepreneurial activity, productivity, innovation and efficiency, it’s remarkable. Greece is a great example of not just of a financial  disaster but of a cultural disaster as it relates to the deployment of capital, entrepreneurial  activity, industriousness and life.

"Government has so nanny-stated the people of Greece, so usurped the private economy, so issued entitlement mentality.  It has affected the culture to the degree that the tyranny is the suffocation of the human spirit, suffocation of the private market, all happening in increments. It is a form of tyranny. It’s not an overstatement to say that.”

Gregory pushed back. The United States is not Greece. The bailouts started under Bush. The growth of government has occurred under many presidents of both parties. At least Obamacare is paid for, which is more than you can say for Bush's Medicare drug benefit. Will Pawlenty still denounce Obamaism if the economy recovers?

Pawlenty replied, calmly and civilly to it all. Not to say that his answers were correct or convincing, but they had a certain internal logic and consistency and they would have convinced a contemporary Republican that this guy is smart and on their side. Which he is. He was certainly smoother than anyone currently running for governor.

Little red-meat rhetoric

That’s not to say that Pawlenty’s presidential campaign is about to soar. If the times call for red-meat rhetoric, Pawlenty seems more reluctant than many of his chief competitors to throw it around. He was, for example, reluctant to start blaming Obama for the Louisiana oil spill/cleanup disaster until more facts are known (with a passing, somewhat personal, reference to those who rushed to judgment on the cause of the Minneapolis bridge collapse). His caution on this one was such that esteemed colleague Bill Salisbury’s coverage of the event was headlined “Pawlenty turns moderate for Meet the Press.”

I wouldn’t go that far. Pawlenty called for the repeal of the Obama health care bill; embraced and defended the Arizona illegal immigration law (he says it specifically prohibits the cops from relying on race in deciding whom to investigate), and says he would have allowed AIG to go bankrupt (he didn’t comment on the potential domino effect from that one). And when Gregory asked whether Pawlenty's alarm about deficit and debt might cause him, if he becomes president, to seek a tax increase, the audience laughed spontaneously and Pawlenty replied: "The people of Minnesota know the answer to that one."

Of local interest, when Gregory pressed him on leaving a multi-billion-dollar deficit for his successor to face next year, Pawlenty blamed the Legislature. If the Legislature had made permanent his (unconstitutional) unallotment cuts, the projected deficit would have been cut in half, but they insisted on adopting the cuts on a one-time basis. He stated flatly that this is part of a DFL plot to make the deficit look bigger so they can advocate for higher taxes. Hmmm?