When I heard Donald Trump was looking at an Indiana governor to be his vice presidential pick, I was excited. I attended college there, and during those four years, the state had a governor who cut taxes, balanced the budget, supported school vouchers, and signed “Right to Work” into law. His name was Mitch Daniels.
Mike Pence is a fine, if not exemplary conservative governor of the state. Trump certainly could have done worse. But he also could have done much better. Maybe it was Pence’s curse to serve right after the popular, intellectual figure of Mitch Daniels, but nonetheless, Daniels is the Indiana governor Trump should have picked.
Electorally, Daniels was wildly successful. In 2004, he defeated an incumbent governor, ending four terms of Democratic rule. Then, in 2008, he won reelection with 58 percent if the vote — the same year that a Democrat (Barack Obama) won Indiana for the first time since LBJ.
In his post-politics career as president of Purdue University, he has continued to embrace individual freedom while trying to solve the problems facing the education system. While other universities were racked by protests against free speech, speakers being disinvited, and events shut down, Purdue (under Daniels) became the first public university to adopt the “Chicago principles” from the University of Chicago, affirming the value of free speech.
“It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose,” Purdue’s policy states.
Just like he did as governor, Daniels has also put an end to out-of-control spending. Under his watch, Purdue has frozen tuition payments for four straight years. He’s done it without costing the taxpayers extra or putting students deeper into debt. Instead, according to the Chicago Tribune, he has slashed the cost of student dining services by 10 percent, halved rental storage costs, and said no to unnecessary office furniture purchases.
As for tuition, Daniels’ Purdue is an early adopter of an innovative income-sharing program whereby a university-connected entity gives a student money, and that student agrees to pay a set amount of his or her post-graduate earnings back over a period of years.
The idea of income sharing was championed by Austrian economist Milton Friedman, and it has a special appeal in a time of worthless identity politics degrees. It gives both the student and the university a stake in the education. Universities will be incentivized to make sure their students actually have a prospective future, rather than selling them a worthless piece of paper. At the same time, students won’t go broke, as the amount they pay is ultimately based on their earnings, and there also won’t be a need to put the taxpayers on the hook for a student loan bailout.
However, the dream of seeing Daniels in the White House was never to be. Besides the fact that Daniels had already stayed out of the 2012 and 2016 presidential races in order to spare his wife the pain of having their messy divorce and remarriage sifted through, one has the suspicion that even if Daniels did have Oval Office aspirations he wouldn’t be willing to hitch his wagon to Trump’s. A thoughtful, principled conservative, not prone to pushing divisive social issues or spewing personal invective, it’s hard to see Daniels on a Trump ticket. In fact, those very qualities may have caused him reluctance to express any position on Trump lately, but he did take a soft jab at Trump back in 2012, and as governor he denied Trump a license for one of his questionable riverboat casino proposals.
It is likely that had Trump offered Daniels the vice presidential nomination, he wouldn’t have taken it. And that is as good as reason as any why Daniels would make a great VP.
