DFL Ties Pawlenty to Michele Bachmann Again

DFL Press Release:

Another Knee-Jerk Political Overreaction from Governor Pawlenty

Governor issues laughable directive for state government to stop dealing with an organization that it doesn’t deal with

St. Paul (September 17, 2009) —Minnesota’s part-time Governor, Tim Pawlenty, directed the state government yesterday to stop all state funding to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Within two hours, the Management & Budget office released its initial findings showing that Minnesota currently has no interaction with that organization. The DFL Party released this statement from Chair Brian Melendez:

“Once again, Governor Pawlenty is misusing official resources in a desperate attempt to score political points — and once again, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. First he panicked over the President’s speech to students on the first day of school, before even reading the speech — which turned out to be about encouraging children to think critically and value education, not about ‘brainwashing’ as the governor ignorantly predicted. Next, Governor Pawlenty overreacted by boycotting the multi-partisan budget summit — which turned out to be an important first step toward solving Minnesota’s fiscal problems, where even Republican leaders criticized the governor’s absence. Now, again, the governor has leaped before he looks, clearly more concerned with scoring political points than with dealing in reality.

“Yesterday’s directive is just the governor’s latest knee-jerk political reaction to the topic du jour. While the governor's action might make sense if the state actually had any dealings with ACORN, it's not too much to expect that he find the answer to that simple question before he tries to leap into executive action.

“It’s bad enough that Governor Pawlenty has begun moving closer and closer to Representative Michele Bachmann’s extreme right-wing ideology. But now he is even adopting her tactic of making politically expedient claims without any factual basis. If the Governor continues to abandon Minnesotans to pursue his national ambitions, and keeps jumping at every nonsensical chance for political opportunism, then he will share yet another trait with Representative Bachmann — total ineffectiveness.”