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Nearly six in 10 Republicans replied with a resounding “don’t know” when asked their opinion of Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota who is poised to form a presidential exploratory committee Monday afternoon.

 The broad unfamiliarity among potential GOP voters in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll is an early challenge for Pawlenty, who will become the first major candidate to formalize his interest in running for the White House.

 Some 28 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said they have favorable views of Pawlenty, 15 percent unfavorable ones. Most, 58 percent, opted out on the matter.

 In the poll, Pawlenty fares significantly better among Republican men than he does among GOP women. Among GOP men who expressed an opinion, Pawlenty runs about 4 to 1 favorable, but among women, there’s a narrow six-point gap between the percentages expressing favorable and unfavorable views (19 to 13 percent, with 67 undecided). Forty-eight percent of Republican men expressed no opinion.

A late February NBC-WSJ poll had President Obama thumping Pawlenty in a hypothetical 2012 match-up, 50 to 31 percent. In that poll, the president was up by 22 -points among political independents.

How much of Obama’s advantage in that poll had to do with the public’s not knowing much about Pawlenty, a two-term governor, will start to clarify after Monday’s announcement.

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After both a historic (see Desiree Rogers, the first African-American social secretary) and shaky start (see Ms. Rogers, whose first state dinner would best be remembered as “Salahi-gate”), the White House made history yet again when it announced Friday that Jeremy Bernard will be the new social secretary. Mr. Bernard will be the first openly gay person to hold that position.

“Jeremy shares our vision for the White House as the people’s house, one that celebrates our history and culture in dynamic and inclusive ways,” President Obama said in an e-mail statement. “We look forward to Jeremy continuing to showcase America’s arts and culture to our nation and the world through the many events at the White House.”

Currently, Mr. Bernard serves as senior adviser to the United States ambassador to France. He previously served as the White House liaison to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Mr. Bernard and Rufus Gifford, his then-partner, were early supporters of Mr. Obama’s candidacy in California. The pair lived in Los Angeles and raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama when he was an Illinois senator.

When they moved to Washington, they scored a two-bedroom in a green building in the city’s hip Logan Circle neighborhood, and quickly earned a reputation as a power couple.

“I am deeply humbled to join the White House staff as Social Secretary and support President Obama and the First Lady in this role,” Mr. Bernard said in an e-mail statement. “I have long admired the arts and education programs that have become hallmarks of the Obama White House, and I am eager to continue these efforts in the years ahead.”

Mr. Bernard will be the third social secretary in the Obama administration. After Ms. Rogers left, she was replaced by Julianna Smoot, a fund-raising powerhouse and political operative who stepped down in February after just 10 months, to join the president’s re-election operation in Chicago.

Jonathan Capehart, an openly gay man and editorial writer for The Washington Post, first broke news of Mr. Bernard’s hiring in a blog post this afternoon. After disclosing that he and Mr. Bernard are friends, he praised the appointment as “an excellent choice.”

“He will bring a certain warmth and irreverence to the job that will make him a joy for his colleagues to work with,” Mr. Capehart wrote. “His knowledge of the Obamas and his intense attention to detail will ensure that their vision for the people’s house continues seamlessly. And he has a reverence for the presidency and the meaning of the White House that will make him an imaginative steward of their image.”

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With self assurance, eloquence and a soupçon of mild defiance, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky gave his first speech on the floor of his new legislative home Wednesday, noting that while he would be sitting at the desk of “the great compromiser,” Henry Clay, he would not be taking many cues from the 19th-century Kentucky lawmaker and founder of the Whig Party.

“Henry Clay’s life is at best a mixed message,” said Mr. Paul, who gained national attention during his successful Senate bid by calling for huge — and at the time controversial — cuts to federal spending in the spirit of the Tea Party movement. Mr. Clay, a slave owner, advocated in a complex manner, for the end to the practice, advocating that free slaves be sent back to Africa.

Mr. Paul, in a narrative leading toward his passion hammering away at federal spending, noted that Mr. Clay’s cousin, Cassius Clay, was an “unapologetic abolitionist” who stood with greater moral authority on the matter. “Is compromise the noble position?” Mr. Rand pondered during his remarks. “Is compromise a sign of enlightenment?”

While Mr. Paul noted that the argument over the national debt was not the moral equivalency of the slavery issue that divided the nation, he said: “Many ask, ‘Will the Tea party compromise?’ The answer is of course there must be dialogue and ultimately compromise.”

He added, “The compromise that we as conservatives must acknowledge is that we can cut some money from the military,” which could come about if “liberals” would agree to make cuts in domestic spending.

“As long as I sit at Henry Clay’s desk I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement,” he said.

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Some of the Tea Party’s most prominent candidates never made it to Washington (think Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell of Delaware), but the movement that perhaps best embodied the anti-incumbent sentiment of 2010 has nonetheless gained a toehold in the upper chamber of Congress. And on Thursday it became official: Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the Tea Party patron, and the freshmen senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah held the first official gathering of the Senate Tea Party Caucus.

But other newly elected Republican senators have refused to join, including some who had Tea Party support in the fall campaign, like Senators Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Kelly A. Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Marco Rubio of Florida. And Mr. DeMint, who has been flirting with the idea of a presidential run, was the only nonfreshman senator to sign on.

With its small membership, the Tea Party Caucus amounts to fewer than 10 percent of Republicans in the Senate, making it a minority within the minority.

Mr. Lee, in an interview on CNN, said size did not matter.

“It’s a relatively small group at this point, and I don’t necessarily think it needs to be big,” Mr. Lee said. “We’re not intending this to be a full-blown, influential caucus. We’re intending this to be a conduit for information to pass between individuals who sympathize with the Tea Party movement and the United States Senate.”

Mr. Lee added, “In time, it may grow.”

The House Tea Party Caucus, led by Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, held its first event late last year.

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A number of people who assisted or survive the victims of the Arizona shootings will join Michelle Obama in her gallery box in the House chamber on Tuesday night to watch President Obama deliver the annual State of the Union address.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that seated near the first lady for the joint session of Congress would be Daniel Hernandez, an intern to Representative Gabrielle Giffords whose immediate attention to her brain wound is credited with helping to save her life; members of the family of the youngest victim who died, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green; and Dr. Peter Rhee, the director of the trauma center at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where the casualties were treated.

According to The Associated Press, Ms. Giffords’s office said other attendees would include two other trauma surgeons, Randall S. Friese and G. Michael Lemole Jr., and a nurse, Tracy Culbert. They also cared for the 19 victims — six of whom died — after a gunman opened fire at an outdoor event where Ms. Giffords was meeting with constituents on Jan. 8. Jared Loughner, 22, has been charged in the shootings.

White House aides had said that Ms. Giffords’s husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, a NASA astronaut, declined an invitation to attend the speech so that he could remain with his wife, who has been moved to a rehabilitation center in Houston that is nearer where he lives and trains for a coming space shuttle mission.

Mr. Obama is expected to recognize the Arizonans at some point in his address. He recently paid public tribute to them in a speech at a memorial service in Tucson — for example, insisting that a reluctant Mr. Hernandez accept the widely bestowed designation of hero for his actions after the shooting.

Mr. Gibbs, in his daily White House briefing, declined to say whether Mr. Obama would propose any federal limits on assault weapons or on high-capacity ammunition clips used in the shooting.

The tradition of inviting people to sit with the first lady for the nationally televised speech dates to Ronald Reagan. In January 1982 he introduced a government employee, Lenny Skutnik, who that month had jumped into the icy Potomac River after a plane crash to rescue a drowning woman, as representative of “the spirit of American heroism at its finest.”

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First Lady Michelle Obama on Thursday urged parents to hold up the lives of Christina Taylor Green and other victims of the Tucson shooting as examples for their children, and to speak with their children about tolerance in wake of the tragedy.

In an open letter to parents, Mrs. Obama said that her own daughters, like many other children around the country, are struggling to make sense of what happened. “The questions my daughters have asked are the same ones that many of your children will have – and they don’t lend themselves to easy answers,” Mrs. Obama said in the letter. “But they will provide an opportunity for us as parents to teach some valuable lessons – about the character of our country, about the values we hold dear, and about finding hope at a time when it seems far away.”

Mrs. Obama does not often wade into the major issues of the day, but in her letter she said that the Tucson shooting has left both herself and her husband “shocked and heartbroken.”

“As parents, an event like this hits home especially hard. It makes our hearts ache for those who lost loved ones. It makes us want to hug our own families a little tighter. And it makes us think about what an event like this says about the world we live in – and the world in which our children will grow up.”

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