Tim Pawlenty Quits the GOP Race

Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota, announced Sunday the end of his presidential candidacy.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/5486649061/sizes/l/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty finished a very distant third in the Ames Straw Poll on Saturday. He canceled an appearance on Hannity shortly after that, and now we know why: He told ABC’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning that he’s dropping out of the Republican presidential race.

The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza tweets that the lesson here is that presidential candidates should just skip the straw poll entirely if they don’t think they can win (obviously, that was a successful strategy for Mitt Romney, who did not drop out this morning). But at some point, whether it’s in Ames, or later on at the caucuses, candidates do have to hit the stump and court voters—and Pawlenty was a flop on that front.

Here’s Pawlenty’s announcement:

I saw the Pawlenty’s problems up close on Wednesday when I watched him address a room of (mostly) undecided (mostly) senior citizens in Denison who were still smitten by Herman Cain’s appearance two days earlier. The ex-governor sounded better on Friday at the Iowa State Fair when he was joined by his wife, Mary, but even then he drew maybe half as many folks as Michele Bachmann. Iowa voters followed the same logic John McCain did when he passed over T-Paw for the vice presidential slot in 2008: He’s a safe bet and could “get it done” (to borrow a line from his stump speech), but you only get one vote, so why waste it? Bachmann captures today’s conservative id in a way that Pawlenty never could, no matter how hard he tried.

Tim Pawlenty will be fine, though—he’s finally free to grow another mullet. The real tragedy here has more to do with what Pawlenty did to position himself as a presidential candidate. Once he set his sights on the next level, he became a different kind of governor—doing a 180 on climate change and leaving a famed Arctic explorer out in the cold; denying gay couples hospital visitation rights; promising his support for an anti-bullying bill and then vetoing it. It’s always tough to identify what politicians do for principle and what they do for their future prospects, but to the extent that ambition changed Pawlenty’s politics, it was for the worse.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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