Pawlenty steps onto national TV stage

WASHINGTON - A year after Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced that he will not run for a third term, he will pass one of the most visible milestones in a quest for the White House: He will be on Comedy Central's "Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.

The governor's advisers see Thursday night's appearance as a chancy but high-percentage gambit to raise his national profile and expose a national audience to his least controversial side: his personality.

"The governor's made a point of talking to a wide variety of audiences, and this seemed like a good opportunity to spend some time letting Americans see a different side of his character," said GOP strategist Phil Musser, a senior adviser to Pawlenty's Freedom First Political Action Committee (PAC). "It's a good chance to show a little bit of his personality ... as a decent, funny and warm human being."

Still an unknown quantity who polls in the single digits around the nation, the Minnesota governor remains in the introductory phase of a long national roll-out. "The Daily Show" is a way to get some name recognition outside the Republican inner sanctum of high-buck fundraisers where he has presented himself as a fresh-faced alternative to a battle-nicked GOP presidential field.

Two years out, the jockeying for the GOP nomination remains wide open, unsettled, and somewhat preoccupied with the meaning of the Tea Party movement, which has pushed some elements of the party to the right.

As an early tactical maneuver, appearing on "The Daily Show" has its risks for a mainstream conservative like Pawlenty. Stewart may be one of the sharpest satirists in the liberal constellation, he has a 2 million-plus audience, and he's known for doing his homework.

A misstep could land the Minnesota governor in YouTube purgatory for an eternity -- or at least well past 2012. But if things go well, it could also have a big upside.

"Everybody who runs for president has to take a lot of gambles," said former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, co-chairman of the Pawlenty PAC, which was set up last June to test the waters for a 2012 presidential run. "I have great confidence that Tim Pawlenty can handle this as well as anybody in the field."

Pawlenty has already signaled that he will pay heed to the conventional wisdom on late night television, which has become a ritual of modern American politics:

"I think that good advice for anybody going on that show is: Don't try to be funnier than Jon Stewart," Pawlenty told Capitol reporters this week. "He is the king of the show."

If "The Daily Show" is a rite of passage in the 49-year-old governor's political journey, it is certainly not the first. Aides describe his one-on-one with "Meet the Press" host David Gregory two weeks ago as a "breakthrough moment," along with a friendly radio interview with conservative funny man Dennis Miller, who focused on Pawlenty's budget battles with DFLers in the Minnesota Legislature, a story line that has won him lots of free national media coverage.

Cultural inroads

"It's a measure to some degree, for a politician, that you're getting some national recognition," said American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, a close adviser to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who did "The Daily Show" at least five times before he went to Washington.

"It's not just the audience for the show itself," Ornstein said. "This stuff gets on YouTube. And if he can hold his own with Stewart -- and not everyone does -- I have no doubt he'll send it around in a blast to all kinds of people, including a lot of young Republicans who might kind of like it."

For Team Pawlenty, "The Daily Show" is a piece of a methodical campaign to introduce the governor as presidential timber to as many audiences as possible, from young Republicans and big donors to Hispanic chambers of commerce. But the media component is only the most visible side of a strategy initially focused on raising money, endorsing Republicans in this year's mid-term elections, and keeping pace with potential rivals like Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is widely seen as the early front-runner for 2012 GOP nomination.

"The PAC has been up and running for a year now, and we're meeting all the mileposts I've set up in my mind to see if a Pawlenty candidacy is viable," said Weber, who has been involved in every presidential race since 1984. "He's raising money and getting well-received. He's in great demand to speak around the country."

But even as Pawlenty has traveled repeatedly to the early primary and caucus states of New Hampshire and Iowa, he has yet to gain much traction in GOP preference polls of potential presidential contenders, where he trails national figures such as Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin.

For now, Pawlenty partisans insist that time is on their side, with no clear party leader in command and the Republican firmament still shaping up around this year's midterm elections.

"There's a commonality of focus on what's going to happen in five or six months that pretty much eclipses a lot of the discussion about who would lead the party against Barack Obama," said Musser, a strategist in Romney's 2008 presidential campaign. "That's different than it was four years ago as the party was thinking about who was going to replace George Bush."

Meanwhile, Pawlenty is testing the proposition that the medium is indeed the message: He's arrived on the national scene.

"'The Daily Show' is a whole 'nother thing, culturally," Weber said.