Columnist George Will has the answer of who should be the next president: former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
Daniels’ commencement speech at Purdue University, where Daniels is the president, has charmed conservatives. Josiah Peterson, columnist for The Federalist, suggested the former Indiana governor for a third-party run.
At Purdue, Daniels told his graduates that they “got your diplomas and your self-esteem the old-fashioned way: You earned them.”
Much of his speech addressed luck, which Obama’s Howard University commencement speech also addressed.
“Daniels was not responding to Obama, but he could have been,” Will said.
“Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did,” Obama said.
Daniel said:
Daniels did not explicitly mention the sensitivity of college students; he is more tactful than his liberal counterpart commencement speakers, many of whom harped on Trump.
“Without explicitly mentioning the paranoia currently convulsing many campuses, Daniels identified its origin,” Will wrote.
“I hope you will tune out anyone who, from this day on, tries to tell you that your achievements are not your own,” Daniels said. He told graduates that “in the end, your successes, and your failures for that matter, are, like your diplomas today, really up to you.”
The comments contrast against Obama’s speeches at colleges and from the 2012 campaign trail when he said “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Daniels acknowledged luck, but he focused on the graduates and their decisions:
Here’s the deal: You can’t take luck completely out of the equation, but you can tilt the odds in your favor. Decisions you make, and effort you either do or don’t put in, will either increase or reduce the chances that life’s breaks break in your favor.
In concluding that “Purdue has the president the nation needs,” Will said that “Daniels’s words to the Class of 2016 clarify why the 2016 presidential campaign offers an echo, not a choice.”
