The Short Answer

CAN THIS MAN CONQUER OBAMA?

The short answer is of course NO. I'll spare you the long answer and just get to the longer short answer.

* Signing two stadium bills without a referendum and a billion-dollar bonding package that includes money for the Northstar commuter rail line and another taxpayer cough up to Minneapolis’ Shubert Theatre. Fully supporting ethanol subsidies and mandates. Signing the "greenest" energy bill of the 50 states; a bill which mandates providers get 30% of their energy to customers from renewable sources such as wind or solar by 2020. In order to meet the imposed mandates the added costs are then passed onto consumers. Pawlenty presided over back-to-back biennial budget increases of 12.4% and 9.8% respectively thus bringing the state's budget to a whopping $35 Billion (pretty beefy for a state with only 5 Million people). Spending the $2 Billion surplus (with half the general fund increase going to education). Signing an anti-private property statewide smoking ban and thus killing many local area businesses in the process. He supports a regional cap-and-trade approach to global warming, which would require companies to pay for the right to make carbon emissions. Mr. Pawlenty supported a 75 cents per-pack cigarette tax. He called it a "health impact" fee. No one was fooled. User fees are generally charged to ensure that those who use a government service pay for the cost of providing that service. In this case, however, it was obvious that smokers were just being tapped to fund health-care entitlement programs. The South St. Paul populist also advocated a temporary ban on ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies. Not exactly the stuff of which markets are made.

Shall I continue or are you getting this?

Perhaps this might help:

"The era of small government is over . . . government has to be more proactive, more aggressive."
-- Tim Pawlenty, 2006.