Veteran Republican Mitch Daniels is concerned about the future of his party as a vehicle for conservative governance.
Daniels, the former two-term governor of Indiana, is now the president of Purdue University, and as such officially nonpartisan.
But he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that he has watched warily as the GOP nominated a candidate for president — Donald Trump — who opposes the reform of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and whose fix for the federal government isn’t to make it smaller, but to bring it under better management.
“I don’t know if the current nominee represents an aberration or a long-term shift in what the party stands for and what the term means,” Daniels said in an interview with “Examining Politics,” a weekly podcast.
“What I found important about [the GOP] was that it was the party that stood first of all for freedom and the assumption of human dignity that goes with it, that we are not mere victims, that it demeans the dignity of people to render them dependent on the state, tell them that they need the protection of their benevolent betters to get by in life,” he added. “I still believe that there must be room in America for at least one party that starts from those premises. Whether that is still the one we’ve known as the Republican Party I can’t tell you.”
Daniels, 67, devoted much of his professional political life to budget issues. He served as director of the White House budget office from 2001 to 2003, under President George W. Bush.
During Daniels’ tenure as governor he focused on efforts to reduce the size and scope of Indiana’s bureaucracy. In his podcast interview, Daniels also discussed education reform and his concerns about the federal deficit.
