- Update 5/16/11 - FRC writes: "...I've been asked a lot about the chances of Gov. Mitch "Truce" Daniels in 2012. On the heels of signing a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, Daniels managed to poke pro-lifers in the eye again when he answered a question about a possible running mate with Condoleezza Rice. Although she has stellar credentials on national defense, the former Secretary of State has long held pro-abortion views, which makes her a non-starter with social conservatives. It is ironic, however, that Governor Daniels seeks a truce with liberals while he attacks the sensibilities of pro-family conservatives within his own party.
Me: Based on this report, I don't have much enthusiasm for any presidential aspirations he may have.
-(Original post) - Mona Charen considers the facts on Indiana GOP Governor Mitch Daniels:
[...] Mild-mannered Daniels may well be the best chief executive in American government.
After stints as a Senate staffer, a senior adviser to Pres. Ronald Reagan, president of the Hudson Institute, president for North American operations at Eli Lilly, and director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, Daniels was elected governor of Indiana in 2004. He was reelected in 2008 (when Obama carried the state), winning more votes than any candidate in the state’s history.
Inheriting a $600 million deficit, Daniels transformed it into a $370 million surplus within one year, without raising taxes. “You’d be amazed how much government you’ll never miss,” he grins. Six years on, Indiana now enjoys a AAA bond rating, boasts the fewest state workers per capita in the nation, enjoys the third-highest private-sector job growth in the nation, has seen property taxes drop by an average of 30 percent, and was ranked first in the Midwest for business climate by the Tax Foundation. Daniels was named Public Official of the Year in 2008 by Governing magazine.
Wow. Impressive. And he's pro-life, too. Charen says his "pro-life and pro-family credentials could not be more solid." [Yet, he downplays pro-life issues in favor of economic ones and so muddies his standing to some degree amongst social conservatives.)
More on Daniels...
Daniels believes in improving government’s performance — cutting less-important spending in favor of more-important, and keeping close tabs on results. Under his leadership, the state has increased K–12 education funding by 12 percent, hired 800 new child-welfare workers, added 150 state troopers, provided free or reduced-price medications to 288,000 Hoosiers through the Rx for Indiana program, reduced wait times at the DMV to less than eight minutes, funded a $10 billion infrastructure-improvement plan to repair roads and bridges, and improved health care for low-income Hoosiers through the Healthy Indiana Plan, which encouraged healthy behaviors (and which may be unsustainable if Obamacare is not repealed).
If there is one way in which Daniels differs from many conservatives, it isn’t on the importance of social issues, it’s on government. Hanging on the wall of his office are portraits of illustrious Hoosiers, from Eli Lilly to Cole Porter to Gus Grissom. “Our job [in government] is to make it easier for them to do what they do,” he explains. And it’s worth doing well. It matters to Daniels that people have faith in their elected leaders — in the system. “Oh, it’s easy to trash government,” he acknowledges. “I could do it all day. But you have to be careful not to suggest that all of government is corrupt and wasteful and full of knaves. We have some huge problems to solve — many created by government — but government is going to have to solve them too.”
And that brings us back to his reluctance to run for president. Daniels wrote all of his own campaign commercials — as he writes all of his own speeches (or composes them, since he is one of those natural public speakers who need only a couple of index cards). His final commercial in 2008 promised that if voters reelected him, “This is last time you’ll ever have to see me in a commercial.” It was typical of Daniels’s self-effacing humor. But he meant it. And he really hates the idea that Hoosiers would think he was insincere.
My 14-year-old son Ben, upon hearing this, said, “Well okay, tell him not to run commercials in Indiana!” — a solution that might seem a bit lawyerly to the straight arrow from the heartland. For now, he remains undecided, focused for at least the next four months on dramatically improving education in Indiana. After that, perhaps Hoosier voters can extend a waiver about that last commercial . . .