Pawlenty campaigns in Oskaloosa

Tim Pawlenty speaks to a crowd of around 45 in Smokey Row Tuesday

Oskaloosa, Iowa- Republican Presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty, was in Oskaloosa for a speaking engagement Wednesday. Pawlenty spoke at Smokey Row and focused primarily on economic policies. Pawlenty started off his speech with his reason on why he is running for President. “I’m running for President of the United States because I love America, and this country is in big trouble and I’ve got the skills and the experience and the ideas and values to lead it to a better place,” Pawlenty said.

Pawlenty immediately began by attacking the policies of the Obama Administration. Pawlenty then went on to voice opposition to government subsidies, including ethanol subsidies. “We’re going to have to look at all the subsidies. We’re going to have to look at reducing or eliminating most of the subsidies going forward,” Pawlenty said. Pawlenty went on to say “We have such a big problem in this country financially that it’s not about cutting billions of dollars. We’re gonna have to cut trillions of dollars over the next coming years.”

Pawlenty also offered his opinions on healthcare in America. “Let’s have a healthcare plan that really fixes healthcare, not the government centric, unconstitutional, top down, bureaucratic, one size or limited size fits all vision of Barack Obama where he’s going to tax you more and have another government program that’s going to run into the financial rocks in the not too distant future,” Pawlenty said.

Tim Pawlenty speaks to residents before boarding his campaign bus

Before taking questions from attendees, Pawlenty explained why he was different than the other candidates he is running against. “I’m for reducing spending. I’m for school choice that focuses on parents, not on bureaucracy. I’m for healthcare the right way like we did in Minnesota: private not government. I’m for public employee compensation reform to make it look more like the private sector. I’m pro-life. I’m pro traditional marriage. I’m for pro economic policies that will get the private economy going up, the government going down the list. The interesting things for you is not whether the Republican candidates can all get up and spew out those words. They all can. That’s what Barack Obama did. The question is, who’s actually done it?”

After the event, Pawlenty took questions from the press. Pawlenty was first asked about his campaign and if he and his staff were still fired up as much as they were when he announce his bid. “In most of the polls we’ve been lagging, but now we’re seeing momentum. We’re planning on doing well and confident that we will do well at the Ames Straw Poll.” Pawlenty said that he accounted that momentum to getting his message out to the voters. “I’m not as well known as the candidates who ran last time and as we get our message out of reducing spending and cutting taxes and doing healthcare reform the right way and appointing conservative judges [inaudible] not just based on rhetoric, but results, the people are responding to that and we’re seeing some momentum.”

Tim Pawlenty boards his campaign vehicle to head to his next stop of the day

Pawlenty also commented on education, specifically his plan for education with the 2014 No Child Left Behind Standards looming. “Well I think we need to reform education in a variety of ways but we need to push education decision making to the states and to local school districts and to parents and quit federalizing it. No Child Left Behind has some very aggressive goals, many of them that are not being met by current school districts. I applaud the intent of No Child Left Behind, which is accountability, but I think we need to move decision making in the next wave of reform for schools to states, and locals, and to parents,” Pawlenty said.

Pawlenty’s final question was how he would describe his campaign using just one word. Pawlenty said that the word to describe his campaign would be “results.”