The idea of writing a book about a presidential campaign that never happened had not occurred to Don Cogman. He had spent two years trying to get Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, to run for president in 2012. His effort—and it was no small effort—had failed. Daniels had moved on, right out of politics. He’d become president of Purdue University.
Then Cogman, a retired PR executive in Arizona, got a call from Rick Powell, a co-conspirator in the draft Daniels escapade. Powell, the head of global communications at Bloomberg L.P., had heard from a political writer who was interested in why Daniels didn’t run.
“I’d thought about writing something,” Cogman said. But it was no more than a fleeting thought. He had a large box filled with notes and emails from the Daniels venture. But the stuff was untouched. And what he had thought about wasn’t a book anyway. It was a factual account of what he, Powell, and six others had done with such smashing lack of success. Daniels had wanted to run. He was on the brink of running. He believed he could win the Republican nomination. All that . . . before deciding not to run.
“You should write it,” Powell told Cogman. “It’s part of history.”
That was two summers ago. And Cogman was suddenly inspired. He got out the box. He began two months of research. He organized the materials by subject. He pieced together a chronology, Cogman said, “literally down to the day.”
Then he spent the month of August writing. He worked from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., six days a week. What he produced was an unconventional manuscript. It had lists. One was Cogman’s “list of positives” why Daniels should run, 19 of them. It recorded the “basic tenets of an economic growth initiative.” It recommended four people to contact about the budget deficit.
As luck would have it, Daniels happened to be in Arizona that September and called his old friend Cogman. They had met 35 years earlier in Washington when both worked for Republican senators, Daniels for Indiana’s Richard Lugar, Cogman for Dewey Bartlett of Oklahoma. When they got together in Arizona, Cogman brought the manuscript with him.
“I need to tell you something,” he told Daniels. He’d written about “our great adventure.” He said Daniels could read it, throw it away, or “make a book out of it.”
Daniels took the manuscript with him back to Indiana. Six weeks later, he got back to Cogman. He was intrigued. “I can’t believe you remembered all this,” Daniels said. “Have you showed it to Cheri?” Cogman asked. Daniels hadn’t. Cheri is Daniels’s wife. “You should,” Cogman said. But that didn’t happen until six months later.
Daniels and Cogman met again in December in New York. Daniels liked the idea of a book. And he knew a publisher, iUniverse, in Bloomington, Indiana. The book was “self-published” last November with an “Afterword by Mitch Daniels.” The title: Run, Mitch, Run: The Hard Decisions One Man Faced for the 2012 Presidential Election.
Its publication was greeted with near-silence from the newspapers and magazines that review books. There were zero reviews, though two Indiana papers wrote about its existence. Cogman did a few radio interviews. But that was the extent of the publicity. This was not surprising. It was, after all, a book about a presidential campaign that never got started.
Yet Run, Mitch, Run is much more than that. It would be an underground classic if it had been around longer. It’s already a unique addition to the library of books about presidential races. It tells the story of how eight friends and admirers of Daniels plotted to transport him from Indianapolis to the White House. And what caused them to fail.
There had been chatter about a presidential bid by Daniels for months in 2009. But it was an article by Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal that prompted Cogman to contact Daniels. Strassel had asked Daniels about running for president. “You’ll be the first to know, but don’t hang around the phone,” he said. That comment hadn’t dissuaded Cogman. He told Daniels that their mutual friend, Atlanta businessman Tom Bell, was interested in getting together to discuss a presidential run.
The upshot was a golf gathering in Augusta, Georgia, home of the Masters, in October 2009. Cogman, Bell, and Charlie Black, a veteran of numerous presidential campaigns, played 36 holes and talked about the presidency over drinks and dinner.
Bell was blunt. He had two questions for Daniels, Cogman writes in Run, Mitch, Run. “One, do you think you could do the job of president?” Bell asked. “Not do you want to do it, or do you think you could win, or would you want to go through a campaign, but do you think you could be president? Secondly, do you want to be president? Not do you want to go through a campaign or do you think you could win, but would you want to be president?”
Daniels said he thought he could do the job. He knew the White House. He’d been political director for Ronald Reagan and budget director for George W. Bush. The second question “was a bit more difficult for him,” according to Cogman. He thought he could contribute to the country and “was worried about the direction in which we were headed.” But the impact on his family was a concern. “He wasn’t certain this was a hurdle that could be handled,” Cogman writes. His wife and four grown daughters “would not be enthusiastic.” That was putting it mildly.
When the group met in January 2010 at Cogman’s home in Scottsdale, it had grown to eight, nine including Daniels. It included, along with Cogman, Bell, and Black: Rick Powell; Al Hubbard, chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush and now an Indiana businessman; Bob Perkins, a marketing expert who had worked with Daniels in Washington; Mark Lubbers, a close friend of Daniels and a colleague in Washington; and Eric Holcomb, who had managed Daniels’s reelection as Indiana governor in 2008.
What drew them to Daniels was a belief in his leadership qualities, his experience in politics and as a top official from 1997 to 2001 at Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical firm, and his virtue of being a straight-shooter. “He was different,” Cogman writes. Daniels was eager to tackle the biggest issue head-on, America’s looming debt crisis. And he would “run to govern,” not just to win. “It would be foolish to go through all you have to go through in a national campaign just to win with no chance of then actually getting something done,” Daniels explained to his friends.
Their effort was extraordinary. In effect, they organized a presidential campaign in waiting. They operated below the political radar. They didn’t leak. But their secrecy wasn’t total. They put together nearly a dozen “Residence Dinners” with Daniels to discuss big issues with business and community leaders. (Jonathan Martin of Politico wrote a lengthy article on the dinners.) “The feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” Cogman writes. “We had people who heard about them and actually requested to be included.” Potential campaign donors were invited. “Part of our goal was to keep their powder dry and not commit to Romney or anyone else,” Cogman told me.
Daniels didn’t make things easy for his hopeful kingmakers. Like most politicians, he turned out to be thin-skinned. In interviews, he often dismissed the notion of running for president. “I really don’t plan to,” he told the New York Times. “I’ve been as clear as I know how,” the Evansville Courier & Press quoted him as saying. “I don’t expect to do it, don’t really want to do it.” He told the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass, “It’s not happening.” These remarks prompted an email from Black. “Just remember what one of my preachers told me years ago,” he wrote. “You are obligated to tell the truth, but you are not obligated to say everything that is on your mind.”
Cogman concluded the off-the-cuff remarks were “to assure his family” he wasn’t rushing into a presidential race. His wife was a problem Daniels was reluctant to deal with. In Scottsdale, he suggested Cheri could stay out of the campaign if he ran. “I looked at him and said, ‘Mitch, you’re running for president of the United States, not governor, and they’ll never let you get away with that.’ I don’t think he believed me then.” Cheri Daniels, Cogman writes, wanted to be “doing things normal people do”—things a candidacy and life in the White House wouldn’t allow.
At a December 2010 strategy session, Daniels declared, “Well, I’m about 80 percent” ready to run. Cogman stayed behind after the meeting. He talked to Cheri one-on-one, making the case for Daniels to run. The matter of her divorce from and remarriage to Daniels “could be handled,” Cogman assured her. She wasn’t persuaded. “There was no wiggle room [in her opposition], not an inch,” Cogman writes. He initially quoted her response, then let her decide whether to keep it in the book. She was “uncomfortable.” He took it out. “I didn’t want to abuse any trust we had,” he said.
The decision by Daniels not to run would not be announced for months. “But in my heart of hearts, I knew we were done,” Cogman writes. His friends were still hopeful. “But they hadn’t seen or heard the absolute resolve in Cheri’s face and voice.” He had. As for Daniels, he explained his decision simply, “I love my country, but I love my family more.”
