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"      He has for the past year been described as &amp;quot;everyone&amp;#039;s second choice&amp;quot; for the Republican nomination, but as he announces his candidacy today in Iowa, the field clears for former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.  Forget Haley Barbour, he was never going to run. And please, try your best to forget Donald Trump. But the announcements in the past week by Mike Huckabee and now Mitch Daniels are of seismic importance for the shrinking field, and especially to Pawlenty.  In Daniels, we saw a budget cutter with serious credentials with the remnant party of George H.W. Bush, a serious and sober candidate who had already announced his distaste for demagoguing social issues (for good reasons, if you&amp;#039;re him), a man from the Romney-Pawlenty-Huntsman cohort, the cohort that Barack Obama truly does not want to face next fall if unemployment is still over 8% \u2014 the group that has the best chance of beating him.  And in Huckabee we saw a bridge candidate for the Republicans, a man who could have been an amiable nexus for the disparate elements that come together to nominate a Republican candidate for president these days.  And now, Pawlenty stands a very good chance of being that man. Since he launched his Freedom First PAC in November 2009, he has been courting the Tea-Party right to balance his real reputation as a conservative who built coalitions to govern in Minnesota. In fact, it was his embrace of the hard-right line of attack on Barack Obama that was the subject of much of this interview with the governor in St. Paul on the day he launched his PAC, his first step toward becoming a candidate for president of the United States....  CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE AND ONGOING COVERAGE OF CAMPAIGN 2012 ON THE POLITICS BLOG &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9882/tim-pawlenty-2012-video-5794225/>