With tea partiers rallying against government debt and faith in government’s abilities to achieve the basic, let alone the moon we were promised two years ago, 2012 seems awfully convenient for the likes of Mitch Daniels, the affable skinflint governor of Indiana.
At a presser for bloggers held this morning at the Heritage Foundation, Daniels held forth on a number of national issues. While he didn’t say outright that he is running to replace Obama, the formerly Shermanesque denials that he might do so have been replaced with much more flirtatious language.
Part of that might be simply Daniels taking the advice of former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich who is quoted by the Hoosier in a must-read profile by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard that “keeping the door open” gives a state politician a lot more national press attention than he’d otherwise receive.
That can’t be entirely it, however, because, as mentioned above, things seem almost made for a Daniels run, not just in terms of current events, but also in terms of his persona.
In the midst of a recession, mountains of state and federal debt and worldwide financial crisis, running on a platform of “humility” toward government (Daniels’ term) contra Obama is a bit of a no-brainer, however, Daniels also seems to have learned one thing few GOP politicians have: being able to think quickly on his feet in response to uncomfortable questions.
He’s had a lot of practice at that crisscrossing Indiana’s 92 counties multiple times, eagerly interacting with fellow Hoosiers. That’s great for someone wanting to run for president. It’s also given him an ability to overcome the “unfortunate stereotype” of Republicans that they don’t care about the average person.
In that sense, Daniels is a bit of an anti-Bush, he’s also that way in that the former Office of Management and Budget director has no fear of tangling with the bureaucracy at their own game of spreadsheets and inventory audits. As Ferguson recounts:
On his first day Daniels reversed an executive order signed by a Democratic predecessor granting collective bargaining rights to state employees. Union membership plummeted overnight. “I think they were happy to have the extra thousand dollars that would have gone to dues,” Kitchell said. Decertifying the public-employees’ union has spared Indiana pressures that have crippled other state governments. Unhindered by union demands, the governor instituted a “pay for performance” scheme, rewarding state employees who met explicit goals with raises ranging from 4 percent to 10 percent. The salaries of underperforming employees stayed flat. No one was fired, but every time a job went vacant a supervisor had to justify hiring a replacement. The number of state employees has fallen from 35,000 to under 30,000, back where it was in 1982. […]
In the early days of the administration he had a hunch that the government owned more cars than it could use. Lieutenants were dispatched to the parking lots of state facilities to place pennies on a tire of each car. They returned in a month and if the pennies were still there, Kitchell told me, “We said, ‘Give us the keys.’ ”
That kind of record is exactly the sort of thing a Republican candidate needs as the party struggles to most effectively articulate to the average non-conservative why limited government matters.
“Americans have a renewed sense of public debt thanks to personal experience,” he told bloggers today, saying that economic growth is the only way the U.S. can extricate itself from job-destroying levels of public debt.
“The first plank of a growth plan is to convince the markets US is serious about entitlement reform,” Daniels argued saying that he agreed in large part with a plan to reduce federal debt advocated by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).
That may sound like music to the conservative ear, however, not everything is pitch-perfect. He likely will face trouble on the right for raising sales taxes 1 percent and his past as an executive for a pharmaceutical company will no doubt be a favorite of national Democrats to attack. The Hoosier’s call for a temporary “truce” on social issues will also likely provoke some resistance from the Huckabee quarter.
Still, things seem to be coming together quite well for Mitch Daniels. While an official 2012 announcement is still not forthcoming, with the political wind at his back, one doubts there will be too much of a delay.
Update 16:43. National GOPers likely will be annoyed at one remark from this morning’s meeting that I neglected to mention. He criticized chairman Michael Steele and others for playing the “granny card” in the recent health care debate. Thanks to Philip Klein over at AmSpec for picking that point up.
