Why Pawlenty’s Candidacy Failed

There are a number of lessons one could take away from the surprisingly early implosion of Tim Pawlenty’s presidential aspirations, which not long ago seemed like something to be taken seriously.

One is that experience, at least in the traditional sense, doesn’t count for much anymore — or maybe it actually counts against you. This was true in 2008, when President Obama easily brushed aside questions about his having never actually governed anything, and we saw it again in the midterm elections that swept a raft of novices into Congress.

Another, perhaps, is that the advantages that have traditionally accrued to candidates who jump in early have largely evaporated. Mr. Pawlenty, who spent the last year organizing his campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa, started to feel stale and underachieving when his campaign didn’t immediately ignite, while a succession of late entrants pushed him to the background.

But the more salient lesson here, it seems to me, has little to do with Mr. Pawlenty’s résumé or his strategy. If you want to run for president, especially as a little-known establishment candidate, it usually helps if you have something to say.

I’m not talking about an indictment of the other party or a bunch of policy speeches, both of which Mr. Pawlenty delivered adequately. I’m talking about a compelling argument for why your party should choose you and not somebody else who might have more money, or more rousing speeches, or better hair.

Bill Clinton, a little known Arkansas governor, put forth just such an argument when he ran in 1992. Democrats could go ahead and nominate another Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis, Mr. Clinton said, but they would once again be failing to acknowledge the flaws of liberal government, and they would lose.

George W. Bush ran in 2000 as a compassionate conservative, arguing that Republicans needed to transcend the rigidity that characterized the party on domestic issues. In 2008, Mr. Obama held himself out as a generational and temperamental departure from the Clinton era.

Whatever his other flaws as a candidate, Mitt Romney has begun, in recent weeks, to articulate a simple and elegant rationale for why he makes more sense than any of his rivals for the nomination. Mr. Obama didn’t create our economic mess, Mr. Romney says, but the president doesn’t know enough about private enterprise to clean it up. Mr. Romney, a former private equity investor, presents himself as the only candidate who does.

What was Mr. Pawlenty’s essential argument? That he had been a commendable governor? That he was just as conservative as anyone else in the race? That he had a really gravelly voice?

He could have run as the only Republican in the race who viscerally understood the American working class, having come up the hard way. He could have run by arguing, as he did briefly back in the party’s dark days of 2009, that Republicans needed to soften their rhetoric and broaden their base if they wanted to endure as a national party.

Instead, Mr. Pawlenty, who has always seemed like a thoroughly decent guy, ran an unusually tentative and risk-averse campaign, positioning himself as most things to most Republicans. He wanted to be the broadly acceptable Romney alternative who could also out-Tea-Party Michele Bachmann. Whatever you had in mind, he was your man.

Every now and then, a candidate can secure the nomination this way, simply by relying on the ineptitude of his rivals. (John Kerry in 2004 comes to mind.) More often, though, the case you argue is a lot more important than which consultants you hire or how many local activists you manage to sign up.

Mr. Pawlenty certainly isn’t alone in having flailed trying to find a core argument, and he won’t be the last well-regarded candidate in the field to suffer the consequences.

Look at Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah and ambassador to China who, as a fluent Mandarin speaker, could be running as the one Republican candidate who really gets the challenge of global competitiveness. Or he could be arguing that, as a social moderate, he is the only candidate who can win enough independent and Democratic votes to wrest the White House from Mr. Obama and change the nation’s economic trajectory.

Instead, like Mr. Pawlenty, Mr. Huntsman is running an aimless campaign as something in between Mr. Romney and the party’s more confrontational conservatives, a kind of Romneyesque fallback. This, more than all the campaign infighting, most likely explains why his bid is at this point going nowhere.

And what argument will Gov. Rick Perry of Texas advance after the hoopla around his announcement this weekend inevitably subsides? Will it be enough for him to combine Mr. Romney’s governing credentials with Mrs. Bachmann’s religiosity and Mr. Bush’s swaggering gait? Or will there have to be some reason, ultimately, that Mr. Perry that believed he was called to run, beyond the fact that he sees an opening?

This is a question Mr. Perry may need to spend some time contemplating, if he doesn’t want to settle for a good speaking slot at the convention, right after Tim Pawlenty’s.