Minneapolis/St. Paul

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The "new" Tim Pawlenty looks a lot like the old one

The Smiling Face of Pain

STORY BY BRITT ROBSON

PHOTO BY COREY ANDERSON

At the godforsaken hour of 2:53 in the morning, Tim Pawlenty moved through the shriveling victory balloons and wadded cocktail napkins inside the Grand Ballroom at the Sheraton Bloomington hotel and ascended the stage for his first speech as the re-elected governor of Minnesota. For eight solid hours at this GOP election night bash, the phalanx of television screens in and around the ballroom had shown the political carcasses of Republicans piling up like cordwood from coast to coast. Among the races thought to be competitive in Minnesota, Pawlenty was one of the precious few Republican survivors. The shell-shocked die-hards left in the audience may not have known whether to cheer or cry, but Tim Pawlenty remained the once and future Boy Wonder.

In securing his razor-thin margin of victory, Pawlenty had once again leaned on his common-man folksiness and affability, subtly reinforcing the autobiographical flourishes of his first campaign, when he introduced himself as the son of a milk truck driver from South St. Paul, a boyish go-getter who had put himself through college and could still be enticed into a game of pickup hockey. But this time out, he had a record to defend. By "solving" a $4.5 billion budget deficit without raising taxes, Pawlenty had thrown tens of thousands of people off state-supported health care, plunged hundreds of schools into a state of chaos and ceaseless budget-cutting, broken the "Minnesota Miracle" compact of responsible revenue-sharing between state and local governments, and intensified the gridlock of our transportation system. Literally dozens of Pawlenty's Republican colleagues in the state Legislature went down to defeat embracing his agenda.

But not Pawlenty. When his DFL opponent Mike Hatch accused him of "pulling the ladder of opportunity up behind him" by letting the cost of in-state college tuition skyrocket, Pawlenty genially acknowledged that not raising taxes during a budget deficit caused some investments to lag—and proposed that all Minnesota high school students in the top quarter of their class get a year's free tuition. When Hatch claimed Pawlenty was being duplicitous in his no-tax pledge by imposing more than $1 billion in fees and forcing the tax burden to devolve to local property tax rolls, the governor deftly proposed a cap on property taxes.

In the crucial final weeks of the campaign, Pawlenty relied on television ads showing him in casual work clothes, strolling off a rural porch toward the camera while thanking the voters with doe-eyed sincerity for allowing him the opportunity to serve them. Meanwhile, another ad campaign, mostly funded by $500,000 from one of the Texas-based ringleaders of the Swift Boat attack ads against presidential candidate John Kerry two years earlier, depicted Hatch as a nasty, spiteful son of a bitch. Right on cue, frustrated by a gaffe from his running mate for lieutenant governor, Hatch reportedly called a male member of the media a "Republican whore" at the exact point in the campaign where it would be the voters' final impression. Throw in a nerdy third-party moderate who siphoned a lot of anti-Pawlenty votes from Hatch, and Pawlenty was able to ride out the Democratic tsunami by a margin of less than 22,000 votes—out of more than two million ballots cast.

Those who stuck around to see Pawlenty's arrival on election night were bleary, bewildered, and belligerent, primed to seize upon the rhetorical red meat that is a staple of these victory speeches. Instead, the governor delivered a muted personal address that immediately engendered buzz about a "new" Tim Pawlenty.

"I want to start by asking you for your help. This is a time tonight to be humble. It is a time to be grateful," he said. "And it's a time as a state and a nation to come together, and I think we need to do our part to start here and start now, tonight. And over the next four years it is going to be different than the last four years. We have different leadership in Congress. We have different leadership in St. Paul. We have big challenges ahead of us.... In the coming weeks, we are going to build a common agenda to make Minnesota an even better place. It's going to include improving education and health care and the job climate and roads and many other things."

Less than a week later, during a speech at the Midwest States Health Reform Summit in Minneapolis, Pawlenty stunned his supporters and opponents alike by announcing that "Minnesota should move toward universal [health insurance] coverage," and that "moving toward a cover-all-kids program in the next legislative session is a good next step." For those who couldn't believe their ears, he spelled out his intent with specific numbers. "We have an opportunity in Minnesota, we have between 70 and 90 thousand uninsured children. About 60 percent already qualify [for health insurance] and then beyond that, we now have the resources to provide coverage for those children."

It seemed an epic reversal. During his bloodletting 2003 budget session, this same governor threw an estimated 38,000 Minnesotans off the state-supported health care rolls and snatched $192 million from a fund specifically dedicated to providing health care to the working poor. Two years later, Pawlenty castigated hundreds of thousands of MinnesotaCare enrollees for accepting what he called "welfare health care." These were parents and children from working families who paid discounted monthly insurance premiums to the state because the coverage offered by their employer was either too expensive or nonexistent. Yet that same year, the state's infamous government shutdown was triggered in part by Pawlenty's desire to again raid MinnesotaCare's dedicated funding source to pay for general fund budget items.

By the end of his first term in office, Pawlenty had reliably opposed numerous bills specifically aimed at expanding health care coverage for children and other Minnesotans offered up by DFL legislators. He had diverted approximately $580 million in health care access fund money into the general fund. And according to numbers compiled by the Children's Defense Fund, there had been a 15 percent rise in uninsured children under the age of six from 2001 to 2004.

While fiscal conservatives howled over the perfidy of Pawlenty's embrace of uninsured children, others gleaned a mixture of political calculation and perhaps a pang of conscience in his new stance. As one commentator put it: "The last election affected Tim Pawlenty the way Marley's ghost affected Scrooge." But it took the "new" Pawlenty less than 60 days to reveal himself as more cunning and two-faced than any redeemed Scrooge. In health care, as in education, transportation, and most every other bread-and-butter issue affecting Minnesotans, the budgetary priorities of Tim Pawlenty continue to make it more likely that the Tiny Tims of this state will have to fend for themselves.

"Healthy Connections" was the name of the plan Pawlenty unveiled at a January 11 press conference. But connecting children to health insurance was suddenly no longer high on his priority list. Pressed for details, the governor was forced to acknowledge that only about 13,000 of the 70,000-90,000 uninsured children he had cited would gain coverage from his plan, which carried a price tag of more than $40 million a year. "I won't have a fixation on access to a system that is broken," he vowed. But he'd used almost the exact same words back in his November speech, and then still claimed that there would be, and should be, enough resources to cover all kids. And what of the 60 percent—tens of thousands of children—the governor cited who already qualify for state-supported health care but aren't receiving it? Two years ago, Pawlenty cut $1.5 million (half of it federal matching funds) used for health insurance outreach in poor and immigrant communities. The size (from 4 to 26 pages) and frequency (from once to twice yearly) of the insurance application has also grown on his watch. But he didn't mention money for outreach at his press conference and there is no line item for it in his budget. (The governor's office did not return a phone call from City Pages requesting an interview for this story.)

There is, however, $31 million proposed in Pawlenty's "Healthy Connections" plan for the creation of a private Health Insurance Exchange, which would allow businesses who currently don't offer insurance to set up pre-tax accounts for their employees to purchase their own coverage. Pawlenty says this will reduce the "administrative burden" on companies, who will be mandated to offer these pre-tax plans for a minimal cost that he estimates at no more than $300 a year per company.

Another major component of Pawlenty's plan is dividing MinnesotaCare into two parts. Those at the upper end of the income eligibility scale would be given the option of MinnesotaCare II, which would feature lower monthly premiums but higher deductibles and more co-payments. Sen. Linda Berglin (DFL-Minneapolis), one of the founders of MinnesotaCare, said that when legislators were first structuring this national model back in the early '90s, a similar idea was considered and rejected. "One big reason is because we didn't believe enrolled families could afford high deductibles," Berglin says. "And if they could, that means we'd wind up with a lot of healthier people in one part of the plan and sicker people stuck in another part." This imbalance, known in the health care business as "adverse selection," can create volatile, expensive swings in monthly premium rates. Another danger of high-deductible plans, especially for people whose incomes are modest enough to be eligible for MnCare, is that rudimentary and preventative care is put off to avoid the high up-front cost, creating more expensive trips to the emergency room later on.

In other words, there is a great distance between the humble, conciliatory Tim Pawlenty of election night, the one apparently determined a week later to provide all Minnesota children with health insurance, and the architect of January's "Healthy Connections." The benefits of the governor's grand redesign of health care are skewed toward the middle class, the people most willing and able to take advantage of the tax breaks he offers. But it does little more than pay lip service to the youngest and most vulnerable citizens, the ones already disproportionately hurt by the budget-cutting of his first term.

Of course the most fundamental reason why Pawlenty didn't walk his talk on universal health coverage for children is because it is too damned expensive. Pretending to maintain Minnesota's tradition of shrewd government investments while holding firm on statewide income and sales taxes has made Pawlenty the latest exemplar of "compassionate conservatism," artfully obscuring the nasty fallout from his tight-fisted budgets with buoyant affability and can-do optimism. His recent re-election is a testament to the polish and charisma of his performance, especially when you consider that the DFL made its largest legislative gains in the suburbs, Pawlenty's traditional stronghold, where voters are increasingly concerned about core issues such as health care and education.

In health care, Pawlenty's response was to make a big splash with a feel-good policy proposal he must have known he couldn't honor. In education, the gambit is even more audacious: Deny adequate funding to the neediest schools as a tough-love incentive to improve their performance.

Many, if not most, Minnesota schools are facing huge financial challenges. First, there is the matter of basic education funding. Pawlenty contends that 2 percent increases in the school district formula for each year of the 2008-09 budget will keep pace with the rate of inflation. But the governor is using the Consumer Price Index (estimated to rise 2.1 percent in 2008 and 1.8 percent in 2009), and not the implicit price deflator for state and local government purchases. Economists believe this price deflator index is a better gauge of school expenditures, because it reflects a greater emphasis on the purchase of fuel and personnel costs than is faced by the average consumer. And the government price deflator is pegged closer to 2.5 percent annually during 2008-09, which, if true, means that Pawlenty's basic funding would leave the schools with millions of dollars in fresh red ink.

Of even greater concern is the rising cost of special education. By federal law, schools have to provide an equal and adequate education to all students. The federal government has never fulfilled its pledge to fund 40 percent of special education costs; currently they foot just 17 percent of the bill. The state of Minnesota has hardly picked up the slack. "The state has done just enough to avoid being sanctioned by the federal government," claims Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. "The average school district is spending $500 per student in general education revenue to keep up with special education. That's $518 million of general education revenue statewide. And if we don't keep up with the federal mandates, we will be taken to court and we will lose."

The governor's proposed 2 percent hike in special education funding doesn't keep pace with the runaway cost, meaning that even more general education revenues will be thrown into the breach.

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