Tim Pawlenty, after being asked yesterday about his support for ethanol subsidies, which is a key issue in Iowa.
"We can't just pull the rug out from under the industry," he said.
"There are going to have to be some changes, but we have to be fair-minded about it."
Earlier this year, the National Review's Katrina Trinko detailed the ethanol records of Mitch Daniels and T-Paw, among others.
She found that both were good friends to the industry -- an uncomfortable, ideological brotherhood, but politically-helpful in both Iowa and their own states.
When Mitch Daniels was sworn in as governor in January of 2005, there was one ethanol plant in Indiana. Now there are twelve operating plants and a thirteenth set to start running early next year.
This isn’t an accident: Daniels aimed to increase Indiana’s annual ethanol and biodiesel production to 1 billion gallons by 2008.
As for T-Paw:
Pawlenty signed legislation mandating that all gas sold in Minnesota contain 20 percent ethanol by 2013, up from 10 percent.... In 2005, Pawlenty also urged other states, at a meeting of the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition (which had 31 member states at the time), to mandate that all gasoline contain 10 percent ethanol by 2010.
And it goes on.
The Wall Street Journal also slammed Newt Gingrich for his coziness with the industry, concluding:
Some pandering is inevitable in presidential politics, but, befitting a college professor, Mr. Gingrich insists on portraying his low vote-buying as high "intellectual" policy.
This doesn't bode well for his judgment as a president. Even Al Gore now admits that the only reason he supported ethanol in 2000 was to goose his presidential prospects, and the only difference now between Al and Newt is that Al admits he was wrong.
So T-Paw's not alone, although it's a lonely cause outside the Iowa GOP.
