opinion

The timing of last week's ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court throwing into question Gov. Tim Pawlenty's unilateral axing of almost $3 billion in state spending could not have been more awkward for a Man Who Would Be President.

The same day that the ruling came down, the Washington Post published a column (that later appeared on these pages) by George W. Bush's former chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, beatifying Pawlenty as the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.

Pawlenty is "the successful conservative governor of one of the most liberal states in the union," Gerson wrote, omitting (like 98 percent of national commentators) the fact that Pawlenty never has won a majority of the votes and is a political accident.

(As Pawlenty gathers paeans of flattery from the chattering nabobs on the East Coast, it is time to ask whether they are obtuse -- or simply ignorant about Minnesota. Get to know us, boys.)

But Gerson's Pawlenty pandering tripped hard over the Minnesota court ruling:

The inadvertently apt headline on Gerson's column was: "Is Tim Pawlenty Minnesota's Ronald Reagan?" Well, as the Great Communicator might have prefaced a reply, cutting a nutrition program for the poor (that's the decision overturned by the court) sure seems Reaganesque. Now the table is set for gridlock, budget disasters, shutdowns and showdowns between Pawlenty and public employees. So the answer may well turn out to be yes, Pawlenty is our Ronald Reagan.

God help Minnesota.

The puzzling thing is the disconnect between the governor's lip service to "constitutionalism" while he thumbs his nose at the procedures of government meant to produce agreements about governing the state.

Pawlenty has taken of late to referring to himself as "a constitutional conservative" (as opposed to unconstitutional ones, I suppose) and made common cause with Glenn Beck in denouncing anything they don't like as outside the Constitution. But when the court rejects political decisions to ignore the legislative branch and assert a dubious claim to act on his own without first reaching agreement with elected officials who represent far more of the public's opinion than his puny pluralities of 2002 and 2006, Pawlenty reveals that he isn't, after all, a fan of constitutions.

The court decision was received disdainfully by a displeased governor. He disagreed with the majority, he said, as if it mattered. He liked the minority view better. He didn't apologize for wasting a year of the state's time in dealing with the deficits by refusing to participate in bipartisan efforts and using unilateral methods now rejected by the court. He told the Legislature that his bad behavior was its problem, and that lawmakers should now shoulder the burden by simply endorsing the draconian budget-cutting he did last summer, the imperial stuff now in question.

It's as if he were dismissing the opinions of the guys at the Croatian Hall in South St. Paul and suggesting they should have another round of beer and leave the government to him. That is how you play to the right wing these days. And that is how to abdicate a governor's real responsibilities. Pawlenty, who was shoved, against his will, toward the governor's mansion by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in 2002, has taken all the plays from their playbooks and made them his own.

He has made almost everything he does subservient to his national ambition for power. And he has left the state of Minnesota worse off than he found it.

Just days before the court ruled that the emperor had no clothes, a Christian press in Carol Stream, Ill., Tyndale House Publishers, announced plans to publish a "memoir" by Pawlenty next year (in time for the start of the 2012 campaign) in which the governor modestly plans to salute his "great American success story."

Just the sort of homemade hagiography to put on the nightstand besides your copies of Mitt Romney's and Mike Huckabee's self-aggrandizing tales, especially if you suffer from insomnia. But there is another book that Pawlenty seems to want to emulate. It's called "Going Rogue." The only difference is that Alaska's Sarah Palin had the decency to leave office before abandoning her duties.

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. He can be reached at nickcolemanMN@gmail.com.