Most of the talking points were the same. Down with “ObamaCare” was a common theme, and each candidate made sure to tout his or her “100-percent pro-life record.” #

“If we’re going to have a new and better direction for America, we’ll need a new and better president,” said Pawlenty, whose speech, at just under three minutes, was by far the shortest. (Pawlenty was not initially listed as one of the candidates taking part in the forum, and is said to have given short notice before his appearance.) #

Each candidate also referenced the Constitution numerous times, a smart move considering the hefty number of tea partiers in the audience. Santorum said that he carries a pocket-sized Constitution with him, taking it out to illustrate his point. “The tea party is a pro-life movement,” Santorum said, “and they always carry their Constitution. I happen to always carry one, too. It’s a good thing to do.” #

Santorum said that there’s more to a pro-life candidate than his or her voting record. “A 100-percent pro-life record is fine and good,” he said. “But it’s another thing to be the person at the tip of the sphere and fight the popular culture and fight the media and hold them accountable for the lies they tell about the pro-life movement.” #

Santorum made several jabs at the media during his time at the podium, each of which elicited cheers from the audience. “The media can go from labeling you a ‘conservative’ … to an ‘ultra-conservative’” because of one’s views on abortion, he said, jokingly adding that his kids used to think his first name was “Ultra” after reading the local press. #

“Lot of folks in the media will say this is a faith-driven movement,” Santorum said. “Thanks be to God, it is.” The former senator also made allusions to both the civil rights and anti-slavery movements, saying they, too, were “faith-driven.” #

During his speech, Cain also referenced civil rights, saying that the anti-abortion movement needs to change hearts before it can change minds. #

“The civil rights movement … we can learn something from it. America had to work up to ideal of all men are created equal,” said Cain. “That moral crisis had a leader by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. He not only changed the hearts of this nation but the hearts of the world. And he changed it nonviolently. My challenge to you is … fight back. Some reporter is going to say, ‘He’s advocating violence.’ No I’m not. We fight back with our voices and our votes. That’s where our power lies.” #

The jabs at the media were nothing, however, compared to those directed at President Obama. Each candidate spoke fiercely against Obama’s health care plan, but perhaps none of those comments were as well receieved as Bachmann’s: “Let me make this clear to all of you in Jacksonville: As president of the United States, I promise to you, I will repeal ObamaCare. You can take that to the bank.” #

A meet and greet will be held Friday morning at 11:45 a.m. at the Marion Public Library and, later that evening at 6 p.m., Pawlenty will serve as keynote speaker at the Johnson County Republican Party’s Reagan Dinner. The dinner is being held at Clear Creek Amana High School in Tiffin. The first event is free to the public and the evening event is a party fundraiser.

On Saturday, at 9:45 a.m., Pawlenty will meet with Iowans at Legends American Grill in Marshalltown. At 1:30 that afternoon, he will host an ice cream social and town hall meeting in Indianola at One Stop Sandwich. Both of these events are free to the public.

According to his Iowa staff, Pawlenty’s remarks during this visit will focus on the importance of cutting the federal deficit.

Pawlenty said his official decision depends on whether his family is prepared for a run, which he says they are, and whether he has the right message. His appearance Sunday at a Christian bookstore in Central Iowa is only one hint that courting evangelical conservatives could be part of his 2012 strategy in the Hawkeye State, which he says is similar to his own home state.

“As you drive from southern Minnesota to northern Iowa, you can’t hardly tell the difference,” Pawlenty said in Ankeny, “because the people are very similar, the landscape is very similar, there’s a lot of the same values and culture in our states and there’s a great, great overlap, and there’s a lot of similarities between Minnesota and Iowa and it feels very comfortable here for me.”

But Pawlenty, after being asked about fellow Minnesotan and tea party favorite U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann testing the waters in Iowa, dismissed the impact of another Midwesterner entering the race.

Tim Pawlenty signs books during a stop at a Christian bookstore in Ankeny on Sunday (Photo by Tyler Kingkade/Iowa Independent).

“People are going to make decisions about who they want in these offices not based on geography, but based on record and what kind of people they want in these offices,” Pawlenty said.

Perry Aasness, who worked in Pawlenty’s administration and now is vice-president of producer and industry relations at the National Pork Board, said he feels like Pawlenty being a Minnesotan could help him connect with Iowa voters.

“I think people will relate to his style, his personality, and the way he thinks about issues and how he tries to make things better, not just for the state of Minnesota but for the rest of the country,” Aasness said.

Aasness said he admired Pawlenty’s service in Minnesota and feels “his integrity and his leadership and commonsense values” would serve him well in a presidential run.

Bachmann got a warm reception from Iowa Republicans when she spoke at an Iowans for Tax Relief event earlier this month. Other possible presidential candidates are making their Iowa appearances more frequent as well, most notably Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

John Sankovitch said his wife said after picking up a copy of Pawlenty’s new book, Courage To Stand, they found Pawlenty to be a “pretty strong Christian leader” who would do the country well.

Sankovitch said he would likely keep an open mind for a while, but Pawlenty stands for right kinds of things, which he said means being socially conservative with Christian influence.

“We need God back in the decisions that we make, we need to go back to the fore fathers, our constitution is based on that and I think it’s been misinterpreted for a lot of years,” Sankovitch said.

He added that he liked how Pawlenty seemed to retain a calm tone when he talked about issues.

Earlier in the week, Pawlenty very similarly said in an interview “I remind people that our country is founded under God, and the founders thought that was an important perspective. I watch my tone so I don’t get judgmental or angry about issues. I try to express myself in ways that are measured and appropriate and hopefully civil and positive. Lastly, I try not to say that God is on my side, but I strive to be on God’s side.”

After a 2010 election season in Iowa which saw social conservatives lead a campaign to oust three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court over their unanimous 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, Republican lawmakers have continued to push a social agenda in legislation less than a month into the 2011 session in the Iowa legislature. Pawlenty supported the anti-retention campaign.

“It’s time for someone to stand up, there’s a large Christian base that just sat back and things have happened, decisions have been made,” Sankovitch said.

Pawlenty may be trying to make his socially conservative stances more well-known. Recent polling of Minnesota GOP primary voters found Pawlenty trailing Sarah Palin with conservatives, but because of his lead with moderates, he was able to nudge Palin in overall numbers.

He has also been making the rounds of conservative media outlets, like the radio show of American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, where he declared he would advocate reinstating “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the U.S. military.

In the coming weeks, Pawlenty will also meet with some of Iowa’s conservative leaders at the Family Leader. The group is currently lobbying to push an amendment through that would bar all same-sex marriages and civil unions in Iowa.

Mike Huckabee won the 2008 Iowa caucus, and remained aligned with Bob Vander Plaats, now CEO of the Family Leader, since that campaign. While Huckabee leads many polls of 2012 GOP contenders, swooning the support of a group like the Family Leader could help tremendously among conservative voters in Iowa.

Before Sankovitch left, as he and his wife examined the autographs they received, he said they would both be praying for Pawlenty and hoping that he runs.

Fischer asked Pawlenty at the end of the interview, “We just saw the ban on homosexual service in the military repealed, overturned. Conservatives will be working over the next couple of years to see that that ban is reinstated. If you become president in 2012, will you work to reinstate the prohibition on open homosexual service in the military? Would you sign such a prohibition if it got to your desk?”

Pawlenty said, “Bryan, I have been a public and repeat supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but if you look at how the combat commanders and the combat units feel about it, the results of those kinds of surveys were different than the ones that were mostly reported in the newspaper and that is something I think we need to pay attention to. But I have been a public supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I would support reinstating it as well.”

Pawlenty also spoke out against abortion, noting that he appointed “strict constructionist” judges in Minnesota and that he opposes same-sex marriage.

Fischer is no stranger to controversy; his group is now listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here’s what the SPLC had to say about Fischer:

Fischer claimed in a blog post last May 27 that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” (Ironically, the elder Wildmon was widely denounced as an anti-Semite after suggesting that Jews control the media, which the AFA says “shows a genuine hostility towards Christians.”) Fischer has described Hitler as “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He proposed criminalizing homosexual behavior in another 2010 blog post and has advocated forcing gays into “reparative” therapy. In a 2010 “action alert,” the AFA warned that if homosexuals are allowed to openly serve in the military, “your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals.”

Gays aren’t the AFA’s only enemies. In late 2009, Fischer suggested that all Muslims should be banned from joining the U.S. military. “Islam is a totalitarian political ideology,” Fischer added in August 2010. “It is as racist as the KKK. … Allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different that granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center built in honor of some King Kleagle.” A little later, according to the Huffington Post, Fischer said that whatever the government does to “to make it unthinkable for America’s youth to join a white supremacist group,” it should also do “to make it as unthinkable for a resident of America to embrace Islam.” Around the same time, the Huffington Post said, he blogged that Muslim values are “grossly incompatible with American values,” and therefore no place in America should allow a mosque to be built.

Here’s Pawlenty’s interview with Fischer:

Bachmann told Facebook fans on Friday morning that she will be attending:

“I am excited to tell you that I have received and accepted an invitation to speak at CPAC this year. I hope I will have the chance to meet you while I am there. Please let me know if you be attending.”

Bachmann attended the event in 2009 where she said to the new RNC chair, “Michael Steele, you be da man!” and railed against taxation with representation. “I just wondered that if our founders thought taxation without representation was bad, what would they think of representation WITH taxation?”

In 2010, she spoke about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“These are rights that government can never take away from us,” she said. “What does that say about Obama’s thought police and Obama’s speech police. That is not what the founders meant.”

Here’s her 2010 speech:

Pawlenty is also confirmed as a speaker, according to the CPAC website. When he attended in 2009 he praised wife Mary: “I want to acknowledge and thank my beautiful wife, Mary. She’s amazing, she’s fantastic and … she’s hot, absolutely.”

In 2010, he said, “God’s in charge. There are some people who say ‘Pawlenty, don’t bring that up. Its politically incorrect.’ Hogwash! …I say to those naysayers that try to crowd out God from the discussion, if it’s good enough for the founding fathers it’s good enough for us.”

Here’s his 2010 remarks:

Pawlenty praised Republicans who won elections in Iowa and New Hampshire on Tuesday. Beyond noting the GOP gains in the Hawkeye State, he also touted Iowans’ vote against retaining the three Supreme Court justices on the ballot, a prominent cause for the social conservative base in the state during the election and a topic that Pawlenty addressed in visits to the state earlier this year.

Pawlenty has invested much of his time and his political action committee’s money in these first-in-the-nation states. While many potential 2012 Republican aspirants have taken a measured approach toward launching their Iowa campaigns, Pawlenty has frequently visited his neighbor state to stump for Republican candidates.

Pawlenty’s full statement on the Iowa results:

Voters in Iowa rejected big government and elected conservatives up and down the ticket. Governor Branstad, Secretary Schultz, Secretary Northey, Auditor Vaudt, Kraig Paulsen and the newly elected Republicans in the state legislature will fight for fiscal responsibility and keep a lid on taxes to create new jobs. Our Freedom First PAC in Iowa was proud to support dozens of these candidates and congratulates them on their historic victories.

To their great credit, voters in Iowa yesterday exercised their right to remove judges who were making laws, rather than interpreting them. They broadcast to Iowa and to the nation the clear and strong reminder that the Constitution says ‘We the people’ not ‘We the judges’. The people of Iowa defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and activist judges wrongly attempted to undermine that.

Patrick Caldwell reports for The American Independent.

It’s premature, I think, but even some Republican leaders are saying Obama will win by a landslide, and politicos are sizing up the potential challengers to a President Obama.

This kind of chatter, however speculative, has the practical effect of undermining Sen. John McCain’s attempts to regain momentum. It also fosters the notion that McCain’s attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have less to do with important policy differences than with efforts to rescue a “losing” campaign.

If the predictions are right, however, smart Republicans won’t wait until November to work on their game plan.

These thoughts were prompted by a note I just received from an astute Democratic operative. Ticking through recent Republican pronouncements about a McCain loss, the operative, who has worked on several presidential campaigns, lays out an intriguing case for why Republicans are not only worried but worrying out loud:

I think that not only do the Republicans know the election is over; they are sensing that an Obama presidency could be highly successful.

Obama will have:

1. Large congressional majorities (and fairly liberal majorities — the conservative Southern Dems that plagued Clinton and Carter are gone).
2. The media will not stop talking about the implications of having an African American president for months — virtually no democracy outside India has elected an ethnic minority as its leader (I can only think of Leon Blum, the first Jewish leader of France during the height of European anti-Semitism in the 1930s as the only thing that strikes me as more extraordinary. [Disreali was an Anglican of Jewish heritage]). Obama will have an incredible honeymoon period.
3. The opposition GOP is a mess without a clear opposition leader – there is no Newt Gingrich or what Hillary [Rodham Clinton] would have become if McCain had won or what Reagan was to Carter. While the Republicans are better in opposition and will win a lot of seats in 2010, all their biggest “stars” (maybe minor celebs is a better term) are governors–Satah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, etc.

All this will allow Obama to do what has to be done to turn the economy around in two to three years and insure his reelection. There really aren’t any excuses.

After 1932, the Dems held the White House for 20 years, and after 1980, the Republicans held it for 12 years. While the financial crisis and overall Bush unpopularity are fueling this particular loss, when you add the overall demographic trends, this could be the beginning of a long drought for the GOP.

An early time to talk about a long drought, to be sure, but that’s the landscape some Democrats are eyeing.