I had a chance to talk yesterday with former and would-be future Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who won the Republican nomination in the May 4 primary with 41% of the votes, to 30% for state Senator Marlin Stutzman and 24% for former 8th district Congressman John Hostettler. This was not an overwhelming margin for a candidate who was elected to the House four times from 1980 to 1988 in the old 4th district and who was elected to the Senate twice, in a 1989 special election to succeed Vice President Dan Quayle and in 1992 for a full term. Coats served as Ambassador to Germany in George W. Bush’s first term and has worked since as a Washington lobbyist—not exactly an ideal resume in this anti-insider electoral cycle.
“It’s a different mood out there,” Coats says. While in the 1980s and 1990s “I’d get 12 to 15 people in town meeting,” this year the candidate’s joint appearances and debates would attract 500 to 600. Hoosiers are upset about taxes, spending, the budget deficit and bureaucracy, he said. “The imposition of more of Washington is really upsetting people. Every household has had to make cuts, everyone is tightening his belt except the federal government.” Coats thinks that voters are ready for what most politicians have considered drastic measures; he told debate audiences that “we have to address mandatory spending, entitlements. We need long-term structural changes along the lines suggested by Congressman Paul Ryan” in his road map proposals. It helps, Coats said, that Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels has managed to cut spending without inflicting major pain. Daniels was reelected by a solid 58%-40% margin even as Barack Obama was carrying Indiana 50%-49% in the biggest Democratic swing in any state from the 2004 election results.
The Indiana Senate seat is open because Democratic incumbent Evan Bayh decided, at the last minute, not to run for reelection. Bayh had hoped to be Barack Obama’s choice for vice president and evidently felt that Obama’s big government policies—he voted for the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 health care bill—undercut his claim to be a moderate Democrat. It’s widely thought that Coats retired rather than run for reelection to the Senate in 1998 out of a calculation that Bayh’s popularity after eight years as a “New Democratic” governor would make him unbeatable; some also think that Bayh’s decision to retire was triggered by a calculation that he would have a harder time winning than at any time in his long career.
Bayh’s withdrawal left no Democrat on the ballot; state Democratic party leaders are scheduled to choose 8th district Congressman Brad Ellsworth (who beat John Hostettler 61%-39% in 2006) as their candidate in a meeting this weekend. The one post-primary poll, by Rasmussen Reports, shows Coats leading Ellsworth 51%-36%. Ellsworth’s vote for the Democrats’ health care bill, despite his previous stated opposition to federal funding of abortion, will clearly be a liability.
As I noted in my Examiner column two days before the Indiana primary (and four days before the British election), the “third way” movements of the 1990s—New Democrats in the United States, New Labour in Britain—which seemed so successful around the end of that decade now seems to have disappeared. Gordon Brown’s Labour party is out of power in Britain and Coats, who entered the Senate race two weeks before Bayh announced his retirement, will not have an opponent with any credibility as a New Democrat in a state that has not shown any appetite for Old Democrats in more than 50 years.
Last and perhaps most important point: A lot of Republicans are wondering whether Mitch Daniels is going to run for president. Coats’s answer: he’s definitely considering it. My view is that his record of cutting spending and his knowledge of the federal government from his stint as director of the Office of Management and the Budget could make him a formidable — perhaps the most formidable — Republican candidate.
