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Tim Pawlenty Is A Management Failure
He Couldn’t Manage Minnesota, Or His Campaign. Why is he running?
In a blockbuster new report on the shady dealings of longtime Pawlenty confidant, Nick Ayers, Tim Pawlenty admitted to having only a tenuous grasp of how his spectacular failure of a presidential campaign operated.
In an interview with HuffPost, Tim Pawlenty revealed he did not fully understand the ethically murky relationship between campaign manager Nick Ayers and his financial relationship with Target Enterprises, the campaign’s media buying firm. Ayers funneled tens of millions of dollars for work to the firm while the firm gave him a percentage of the contract.
The author writes:
“The Pawlenty campaign was a bust, fizzling in less than three months and somehow racking up a debt of half a million dollars…
“I was curious to hear what Pawlenty thought of the fact that his campaign had paid nearly $600,000 for media buys through Target, according to FEC records. Ayers was not legally required to disclose his relationship with Target to the campaign, but various consultants I talked to argued that it would have been the ethically correct thing to do. Pawlenty paused. “That part I wasn’t as clear about,” he said, “as for what his status was relative to Target.”
This revelation comes after American Banker reported yesterday he was particularly ineffective as a multi-million dollar lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable.
The Financial Services Roundtable, in particular, has waned in prestige. It hired former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to run the trade group in 2012, hoping that a prominent political player would help raise its profile. But the Roundtable’s profile hasn’t improved much.
“Governor Pawlenty proved he didn’t know how to manage Minnesota when he left the state with a $6.2 billion budget deficit,” said DGA Deputy Communications Director David Turner. “He wasn’t aware of ethically questionable relationships in his presidential campaign that was saddled with $500,000 in debt. Despite being paid millions, he couldn’t save his Wall Street lobbying group. This begs the question, why is he running again?”