Vin Weber: Flawed Iowa strategy doomed Pawlenty campaign

WASHINGTON — It was a flawed strategy for Tim Pawlenty to focus almost exclusively on Iowa ahead of the Aug. 13 Ames straw poll, Vin Weber, formerly a co-chairman of the Pawlenty presidential campaign, told MinnPost in an interview.  

Pawlenty ended his presidential run the day after his third place finish in the straw poll, which Rep. Michele Bachmann won. Weber, a former Minnesota congressman, joined the Mitt Romney presidential campaign last week as a top policy adviser, an unpaid position similar to one he held during Romney’s first presidential run in 2008.

Weber said one of Pawlenty’s central arguments — that the two-term Minnesota governor could appeal to both conservatives and independents in a general election showdown with President Obama — would have gained more traction with voters as the Republican primary campaign developed. Weber now says his new boss, Romney, has the best chance to beat Obama in 2012, but he first has to beat a Republican field that includes Tea Party favorites Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Here are excerpts of the Q-and-A with Weber:

MinnPost: What is your assessment of what went wrong with the Pawlenty campaign? How come he couldn’t get the traction with voters in Iowa that he wanted?

Vin Weber: Well that’s the central question. I think that the main attributes that Gov. Pawlenty brought to the campaign, that were distinctive from other candidates, were an ability to unite the party, hold together the base and broaden the appeal beyond the base — in other words, our arguments about basic electability. I still think that was true, I simply believe those arguments become salient later in the process.

Earlier in the process, what we have learned, at least in this environment, is that people are more interested in making an ideological statement, and I think that’s what happened. Tim Pawlenty passed all the litmus tests, but he wasn’t the symbolic, ideological statement that I think people at this stage in the process [wanted].

I believe if he had been able to stay in the race, his appeal would have grown as you got closer to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and people are actually thinking about choosing a candidate. We’ve seen that in the past, on the Democratic side, with the historic case of Howard Dean leading in the polls for many months and then in the end, John Kerry overtook him when Democrats decided Kerry had the greater ability to win.

Electability becomes a pragmatic consideration later in the process than ideological considerations. If there was any mistake, we should have not put as much emphasis on the Iowa straw poll and had a plan that would have carried us through to January, but that became financially impossible.

MP: So you think it was a mistake to put all the eggs in that basket, the straw poll?

VW: First of all, I agreed to the strategy, so, I’m not saying I knew better. I do think that that was probably a mistake, but it was a mistake that I completely agreed with, so it’s as much my mistake as anybody else’s.

But, with 20-20 hindsight, you can say a strategy that would have allowed us to keep plowing on to January might have been wiser. At the time, it made sense to do what we were doing. It just turned out to not be the right strategy.

MP: How big of am impact did Michele Bachmann’s candidacy have on the campaign? How did that change the dynamic of how Pawlenty ran the race over the summer?

VW: She had a huge impact, and we said so from the beginning that … she was going to have a huge impact in Iowa. I think she demonstrated that right from day one of her candidacy, that she had great appeal in Iowa and that she was going to be a serious contender there. A lot of the people that backed her probably would have had Pawlenty as a second choice, but we’ll never know that for sure.

MP: Was there any consideration on your part about moving into her camp before you decided to sign on with Mitt Romney?

VW: I like Michele, I’ve known her since she first got into politics and supported her congressional races, but I was on the Romney team as a co-chairman of the campaign in 2008 and I remained close to Gov. Romney and the people around him. That’s the logical place for me to be.

MP: Is there an electability argument that can be made against Bachmann?

I think that there’s an electability argument to be made for Romney as there was for Pawlenty, which is that they’ve demonstrated an ability in the past to appeal beyond the base of the Republican Party. In Romney’s case, we just saw a Mason-Dixon poll in Florida that came out [Friday] that shows him ahead of the president outside the margin of error, and running stronger than Gov. Perry or Michele Bachmann.

I don’t underestimate Michele’s political abilities at all, but she has yet to demonstrate an ability to appeal beyond the party’s base, and I would say the same thing about Gov. Perry. I think maybe they will; that’s what campaigns are all about. But I think they’ve got to demonstrate that appeal or the electability argument becomes a very real one.

MP: Politically at least, Romney’s been a bit overshadowed the past few weeks by Perry and Bachmann in Iowa. What can he do to turn it around and be able to become the frontrunner again?

VW: I don’t know that I agree with your assessment that he has to, quote, ‘turn it around.’ The way I look at it is, he wasn’t a major participant in the Iowa straw poll, by his own choice. So a lot of attention focused there on Bachmann, Pawlenty, a couple of other people, Ron Paul, and not on Mitt Romney. And now we’ve had Gov. Perry get into the race, and he’s a big player, and a lot of attention is focused on new entrants into the race.

[Ed.’s Note: The question was premised off of a pair of polls last week that showed Perry leap-frogging Romney to become the national frontrunner.]

But I think Gov. Romney is doing pretty well and he’s been, as much as he can in this process, waging a general election campaign, or at least a campaign that is aimed at putting him in a position to challenge President Obama. He’s campaigning not only in New Hampshire and Iowa but in some of the other key states like Ohio that you have to have to beat Obama and I think that’s the right thing for him to do.

We have to wait for a while to see how the Perry candidacy develops — it’s too new, he’s got the buzz of being the new guy in the field. Let’s wait a month or so and see what that looks like. I think Gov. Romney is doing the right thing: he’s building a campaign that can credibly claim to be able to defeat President Obama and so far I think he’s the only one doing that in this race.

MP: When it comes to politics in general, how has this more vigorous and energized right wing of the Republican Party affected the way the Pawlentys and the Romneys — the candidates perceived to be more moderate —  run a primary campaign like this?

VW: Every candidate running has to speak to that [movement]. I think that most of them have … you have to deal very specifically with questions about spending and the size of the government. Let’s remember, that same impulse among the conservative base helped drive us to a huge electoral victory in 2010. So while there’s a lot of wringing of hands about the party moving too hard to the right, if you didn’t have a motivated base, that would be an even bigger problem.

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com.