Good profile of conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart in Wired. This passage was especially fun:

A new poll shows that Minnesotans disapprove of Governor Tim Pawlenty (who scores a 42/52 job approval rating) and disapprove of their legislature by an even wider margin (25/66.) Must be because they're rejecting Pawlenty's big government health care plan.

On night one of the Conservative Political Action Conference, as George Will entertained GOP mucketymucks in the Marriott Wardman’s cavernous banquet hall, the next generation of Republicans was downstairs, in the basement, enjoying something more hip. Or, at least, Stephen Baldwin’s idea of hip.
 
“I know you don’t hear the word gnarly too much in conservative circles, but you’re gonna start hearing it in the future!” the 44-year-old ex-actor told a crowd of about 200 assembled youths.

"It's like Tiger Woods' wife, we should take a nine iron to the back windshield of big government spending and smash it out."

--Tim Pawlenty, speaking at CPAC (via CQ Political Wire)

With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He'll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.

The day before President Obama spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, about the pressing need to improve America's teachers, a report was released on the same topic at a conference in Washington's swanky Capitol Hilton. The task force that wrote the report was chaired by Minnesota Governor (and rumored 2012 presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty and included such education policy heavyweights as New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The report's 20 recommendations for improving teacher effectiveness include providing more funding for alternative teacher training and certification routes (like Teach for America), requiring school districts to create teacher evaluations contingent on student achievement, and using those evaluations to help determine teacher salaries and make tenure decisions.

Strikingly, though, the report wasn't endorsed by the full task force. Reasons, according to conference speakers, ranged from a) "there just wasn't time" for all of the members to get their organizations to sign on to the document, to b) it was enough for the full body to have endorsed the "gist" of the report. But it turns out that the schisms on the task force run deeper than the leadership let on. EdWeek reported on Wednesday that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, and a task force member, has called the report "disrespectful." In a letter to the task force's leadership, she said its work "has focused almost exclusively on how teachers need to change rather than how the system and all its actors need to change."

Minnesota governor and potential 2012 presidential nominee Tim Pawlenty made headlines yesterday when he criticized fellow Republican Olympia Snowe for her "deviations" from conservative GOP orthodoxy, and refused to say whether or not he was happy that she was a Republican.

• The Biggest Flaw in Cap-And-Trade?

Chris Orr's post about the early assembly work on Tim Pawlenty's 2012 presidential bid is interesting in that he handicaps the Minnesotan primarily in terms of who he is not: not the flip-flopping, health-care-reforming Mormon Mitt Romney, not the disorganized and "goofy" Mike Huckabee, not the divisive and erratic Sarah Palin, and not the non-candidate David Petraeus. 

Thus Chris captures the basic problem with Pawlenty '12: what, precisely, is his positive appeal? Yes, he's a bona fide cultural conservative; that checks an essential box, but you can't throw a rock at any Republican meeting these days without hitting ten people avid to end legalized abortion and stop gay people from getting married.  Yes, he coined a nice phrase--"Sam's Club Republicans"--to illustrate the need for a broader GOP base.  But absent any real agenda for appealing to these folks, it's nothing but a slogan, and when two young conservatives, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sought to fill out the phrase with actual policies in a recent book, they were generally hooted off the stage by their ideological brethren.  Yes, he's governed a blue state, but has never been terribly popular in Minnesota or had any real national following.

Politico's Jonathan Martin has an excellent piece up on Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's diligent, under-the radar preparation for a presidential run in 2012: the PAC he's opened, the donors and advisers he's been gathering, the operatives (some of whom worked for Mitt Romney in '08) he's been feeling out.

Why has President Obama’s popularity slid over the last few months? One common explanation is that he’s governed in too liberal a fashion--too much big government, too fast. David Brooks makes this case in today’s New York Times. “By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington,” he writes.

Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95)

Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22)

Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95)