Brody’s hawking his interview with Gov. Tim Pawlenty and a couple of the clips are worth a perusal.
I. If John McCain needs to do as much work rounding up evangelicals at this point in the election cycle as Pawlenty suggests (and he sure seems to), then the presumptive GOP nominee is farther out of the evangelical loop than any presidential candidate of his party since the religious right emerged into national politics in 1980. The only real explanation is that his campaign was so much on life support from late last summer through this spring that it had no capacity to do the work of rounding up evangelical leaders that even such non-evangelical characters as Geo. H.W. Bush and Bob Dole managed to do in their 1988 and 1996 races.
2. Asked by Brody to talk a little about his “faith walk,” the would-be GOP veepster gives as lame a response as has been seen this election season since Fred Thompson talked about only going to church when he visited his momma. It could be that since Pawlenty’s particular walk involved a defection from Rome, he doesn’t want to alienate those oh-so-critical Catholic swing voters. But if he can’t do better than this, he’s going to have big trouble making up for the deficiencies in the testimony department of the guy he calls “somebody that I think is probably less comfortable being overt about that than perhaps some others might be.”