Minnesotan tells David Brody: “I don’t know that we need to win Iowa.”
There’s a bunch of people who can do well in Iowa, but aren’t gonna win the election, so people gotta factor that in.”
This is Pawlenty’s first high-profile engagement with Michele Bachmann on the “time to pick a president” theme that he will likely have to trot out and hammer home at some point if he is going to get Iowans to shift from Bachmann-mania to T-Paw solidity. There are certainly many people around Pawlenty who don’t take Bachmann seriously as a general election candidate or a president. But there were plenty of Romney people who thought that about Huckabee at this point four years ago — and they paid a price for their lack of focus. Pawlenty is not likely to make that mistake.
