Washington — Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R., Minn.) says the GOP’s model for 2010 is . . . Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods’s wife. Republicans can “learn a lot” from her, he said. “Let’s take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron” to “smash” the Obama agenda.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Pawlenty began with some winter humor. “Even the U.S. Congress was closed” during the recent blizzard, he said. “Any day Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can’t get to work is a good day for freedom and the American people’s wallets.” Then he turned his aim toward President Obama and Washington’s “pundits and smart-alecks” who “think the sun is setting on conservatism.”

Pawlenty also made a strong pitch for the support of the religious right. “God is in charge,” he said, criticizing the “naysayers who try to crowd out God.” If God is “good enough for the Founding Fathers, it should be good enough for us.”

On national security, Pawlenty got a standing ovation for saying terrorists should not get Miranda rights. He also got laughs (and moans) when he said “we’re now entering an era where the president of France is lecturing the United States of America on the dangers of appeasement.” That, he said, “is like AIG lecturing us on financial responsibility.”

To wrap up his address, Pawlenty appealed to the tea-party movement, calling its critics a “brie-eating” elite from “Ivy League schools” who don’t like “Sam’s Club Republicans” who “actually like shopping at places like Wal-Mart.”