In the wake of Monday evening’s GOP Presidential debate, we have learned much about those who would lead us into the future. This campaign season already is shaping up to be one of the best in living memory.

First of all, we must not listen to the media hacks who currently push two agendas: 1) that the GOP field is weak and has no ideas and 2) that Mitt Romney is our strongest candidate. How they would love to see their failed Messiah run against Mitt Romney, who carries the albatross around his neck – RomneyCare. That boondoggle negates the artillery we gained through Obama’s pigheaded insistence on passing Obamacare over the explicit and strenuous objections of the American people. How can the GOP fight Obamacare with a candidate whose own plan served as the model for it?

Did we not meekly allow the Leftist media to choose our candidate for us in 2008? That was a disaster. We must never again permit the media to corral us into nominating a candidate just because we hope he might get a fair shake from the very media who is pushing him onto us. They are not pushing that candidate for our benefit, but for theirs. They always push our weakest candidates.

Mitt Romney is not our weakest candidate (Ron Paul is), but he is the weakest one the media thinks we can be conned into nominating. We must not fall for that.

Going into the debate, I was most interested in Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who in my opinion were the strongest Conservatives in the race. Ron Paul is not a serious candidate because although his fiscal policy is attractive, his foreign policy is absurd.

I had heard Tim Pawlenty speak on several occasions in the past, and while he has always had good ideas and his record is strong, his personality always struck me as too soft, too nice for the Big Chair. I had already dismissed him by the time the debate got underway.

Herman Cain, it should be noted, is a fine American and a good Conservative. His answers to the specific questions posed during the debate were curiously vague, the sort of answers I might have given if I had no real plan to attack the economy and wished to bluff my way through the appearance of one. But of course, anyone with an understanding of economics has a plan. The plan is simple. The plan was proposed three years ago. It is still a good plan today. If Herman Cain does not know what the plan is, we cannot use his services. Thanks for playing.

Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum know the plan. They differ slightly in their details, but their basic plans are the same. That was unsurprising. What was quite surprising was how forcefully and passionately Tim Pawlenty put forth his own version of that plan. Due to the nature of the debate – the format and the time constraints, that is – no candidate was able to get into great depth about any topic or platform. But Pawlenty was able to get his points across deftly and with a great deal of passion. And he offered something neither Santorum nor Bachmann can offer: nearly a decade of experience at the executive level, leading a big state through a fiscal quagmire by executing sound Conservative fiscal policies. Santorum and Bachmann are Congressmen. The difference is large.

Three years ago, when the Recession hit, I and many others proposed a common sense plan to crush the downturn quickly and put the whole disaster behind us. If that plan had been followed then, we would today be talking about the Recession as an historical artifact rather than an ongoing problem. Pawlenty’s plan begins with that platform – and then improves upon it. It goes farther. It is more ambitious. And it is precisely what America needs to restore the prosperity, security and national pride that has been systematically dismantled by the radicals currently inhabiting Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s Pawlenty’s plan, to be sure. He proposed it more than a week before the debate. But any GOP nominee who campaigns on that platform will crush Obama in 2012, and whoever implements the plan most carefully will lead America to the first great Renaissance of the 21st Century.

Pawlenty’s plan is simple. You can read it in a column on Patriot Post, by Lawrence Kudlow, called “Pawlenty’s 5 Percent Growth Plan.”

Some highlights:

• Reject the built-in-failure mentality of the Leftist assumption that the current anemic growth rates are the “new normal.” America can sustain 5% growth or better with relatively minor changes.
• Slash the capital gains tax from the current 35% to a more reasonable 15% or less, thus stimulating risk-taking, investment, growth and prosperity. Stop punishing success.
• Cut corporate taxes on foreign earnings by American companies, which only encourages companies to leave the US entirely.
• Make small businesses eligible for the new low corporate tax rates.
• Cut income tax rates to only tiers: 10 and 25 percent. Confiscating more than a quarter of your earnings is simply punishing success.
• Slash or abolish taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest, and abolish forever the disgraceful and immoral “Death Tax.” No government should ever profit by your death.
• Privatize as many federal departments as possible, including the USPS, Printing Office and Amtrak.
• Restore monetary sanity to recreate a strong dollar, by reversing the disastrous “loose monetary policy” of recent decades.
• Rein in spending dramatically. America does not have a revenue problem. America has a deadly serious SPENDING problem.

Those are just a few of the planks in the Pawlenty platform. After watching the debate and reading Mr. Kudlow’s excellent column, I have been forced – to my great surprise – to take new stock of Tim Pawlenty. The MN Governor stands in a whole new light. And it is past time we took a long hard look at what he has been doing.

America is in deep danger, greater danger than we have faced since WWII – possibly than we have ever faced in our history. We have learned to our sorrow that we cannot climb out of this trouble by eloquent words, empty platitudes or reckless policies. We cannot spend ourselves out of debt and we have run out of credit cards to max out. This is no joke, no rock concert or American Idol program. This is the future of our great country, lying there on life support, wondering what we will decide to do next.

We need serious leaders this time. What I saw on that stage Monday night was a whole row of serious leaders, ready to step forward and do what needs to be done. And among them, one man clearly understood better than the others what those hard decisions need to be. Tim Pawlenty is a serious man with a serious plan, and the Republican Party needs to take a serious look at him for 2012.

Mr. McNamara is a political blogger, and author of “Chuckleheads,” a collection of satire tales available for download at Amazon.com.