Reihan Salam was an early Daniels supporter:
I agree. Daniels has always been one of my favorites on the Republican side of the aisle, and it’s a real shame to see him drop out of the race before it has even truly begun. Placing his family before politics, however, was the right thing to do, even if it has many people disappointed.
Daniels, you may recall, was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Many commenters have pointed out that Daniels grossly underestimated the cost of that war (just as virtually every other government estimate grossly underestimated the cost, duration, and violence of the war).
Reihan directs us to this piece that Ross Douthat wrote some time ago:
In other words, Daniels’ estimate for what the U.S. would spend in Iraq during “a short, successful war” (which is what we initially seemed to have fought) tracked almost exactly with what the C.B.O. and House Democrats were estimating at the time. He failed, obviously, to project out the costs of a long-term occupation, a counterinsurgency, and all the rest: As a senior administration official (possibly Daniels himself) put it, addressing reportersin March 2003, the O.M.B.’s $60 billion estimate anticipated “a conflict, a period of stabilization in Iraq, and the phased withdrawal of a large number of American forces within that six-month window,” which turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong. But the question is whether it was the Office of Management and Budget’s job to figure out in advance how wrong Donald Rumsfeld’s plan for Iraq would turn out to be. Daniels wasn’t the Secretary of Defense, and he certainly didn’t set the administration’s strategy; he took their strategic vision and tried to cost it out. He could have publicly questioned that vision, and issued sweeping 10-year cost estimates for what might happen if Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” plan sent Iraq spinning into chaos — but that isn’t what O.M.B. directors generally do. (I suspect we’ll wait in vain for Peter Orszag’s report: “Obamacare: A Worst-Case Scenario.”) Again, this doesn’t make him a hero, but I’m not sure it makes him a villain in the story either.
I often questioned this line of thinking from critics of Daniels. After all, what is the proper role of an OMB director? Unlike the CBO, the OMB is a part of the administration and serves as much a political purpose as anything. The CBO doesn’t answer to the president, but the OMB certainly does. Unless Bush asked for a worst-case-scenario, there is no reason Daniels should have given him one, or published one for the public.
Daniels was good on a number of other issues as well.
Conor Friedersdorf called him the Tea Party’s candidate that the Tea Party. I’m not quite so sure. In many ways Daniels was too pragmatic for the Tea Party. He has been pretty good on a number of issues, from healthcare to prison reform. On healthcare, Daniels has actually spent a good deal of time trying to expand and improve Indiana’s Medicaid program, leading to a complicated relationship with conservatives.
Beyond this, Daniels identifies more closely as a classical liberal than a conservative. His mild social conservatism is tempered by a desire to set aside the culture wars. As Ilya Somin noted a while back:
That being said, Ilya writes,
Of course, all this is all, unfortunately, a moot point now that Daniels has announced he will not seek the GOP nomination. We are left with a decidedly weak field, and the remaining libertarian candidates are too far outside the mainstream to be really viable.
Mitch Daniels represents what the Republican Party could be if it actually did call a truce on social issues, and turned its back on the talk-radio right and the Fox News “happy meal conservatism“. Or maybe he represents what a moderate-libertarian administration would be like.
Either way, his absence in the 2012 GOP primary will only make the absence of a reality-based voice on the right that much more pronounced.
