In Praise of Mitch Daniels

I never thought I'd support someone from the George W. Bush administration in anything ever again. Virtually everything those people touched, whether it was the economy or foreign policy, almost immediately turned to ashes. Was your average American better off in 2009 than he was in 2001? How about the economy? America's position in the world? The military?

Mitch Daniels was Bush's Director of the Office Management and Budget from '01 to '03, when the ruinous tax cuts were debated and passed and the United States found itself in the largest and most spread out military deployments since the Second World War. Worse, he was the point man in attacking Larry Lindsey's now ridiculously small cost projection of the Iraq War. He bears at least some of the responsibility for the consequences of those policies. If nothing else, Daniels demonstrated infinite wisdom in fleeing to Indiana governor's mansion before the catastrophic economic collapse of 2007-2008.

Having said that, he might be the only person capable of saving the Republican party from itself and the last best chance that America has. If he decides to run, I'll likely support him in his quest to become the 45th president of the United States.

Of course, the media profiles of the governor are going to make that as difficult as possible.

If you’ve heard anything about Indiana’s very slight, very balding, very unimposing governor—and that’s a big if—it’s probably just the opposite: that he couldn’t possibly win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and that even if he did, his chances of defeating Obama in the general election would be close to nil. The reasons, they say, are many. At 5 feet 7 (in boots), Daniels is shorter than Obama’s 12-year-old daughter, Malia. His rather uninspiring demeanor—reticent, stiff, and slightly skittish, with darting eyes and long blanks between words—better suits a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, which he happens to be, than a leader of the free world. And his comb-over is borderline delusional. As conservative journalist Andrew Ferguson recently put it, “I see [Daniels] as he strides toward the middle of the stage to shake hands with Obama before the first debate and comes up to the president’s navel. Election over.”

That's the kind of reality show bullshit that Americans are going to have to get over in a hurry if they expect their country to be an economic or military power thirty years from now. If they continue to view their electoral politics as an uglier and less talented version of American Idol, they'll see the United States slip into the same rapid decline England did between 1919 and 1960, if not a worse one.

As I've written repeatedly over the last couple of years, America's debt will soon reach $14 trillion, which is exactly the size of its GDP. Because of the projected expansion of interest payments on the debt, coupled with the growth of non-discretionary entitlement spending as a percentage of the budget, the United States will face a total fiscal collapse in the not-too-distant future. The math is what it is. The idea that someone can't be elected to meet that challenge because he's short and bald suggests nothing other than that Americans just aren't serious enough to survive and probably deserve to live a Dickens novel.

There's no Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings, and the sooner Republicans understand that, they better off they'll be. Christ, Reagan wouldn't be considered Reagan in today's hallucinatory Teapublican version of silly conservatism. The Reagan that was invented after 1994 is almost entirely fictional and wholly farcical, as anyone who actually took the time read Reagan's memoirs will tell you.

The assertions of delusional bloggers and delirious talk show hosts aside, populism is only going to make matters worse. If you assume that Tea Party and GOP candidates are telling the truth - which they almost certainly aren't - they're going to blow up the debt as badly or worse than even Obama's "socialist" Democrats already have. Extending the Bush tax cuts without paying for their $3.7 trillion dollar cost over ten years, while only tinkering with the 17% of the budget that is discretionary non-defense, non-homeland security spending is a recipe for fiscal disaster. The numbers simply don't add up.

Mitch Daniels might be the only person in America who seems to know that. He's certainly the only one who's being even halfway serious about it, and smart people are starting to recognize that.

More importantly, Daniels is forthright where even Reagan wasn't. Other than to point to his executive experience as governor of California, Reagan mostly ignored what he actually did in that office, which was sign the largest tax increase in the state's history. As president, he increased taxes almost as much as he raised them, being careful to call them "revenue enhancements."

Certainly, Reagan was never this honest;

Since leaving Washington in 2003, however, Daniels has returned to his skinflint roots, proving that even the most blemished Bushie can redeem himself for the austere age ahead. Exhibit A: Indiana. Onstage in Muncie, the governor promotes his fiscal stewardship with a PowerPoint presentation called “Fighting the Recession to Win.” His slides tell a compelling story. Since 2005, Daniels has slashed Indiana’s budget by $440 million and more than halved its rate of spending growth, and it’s possible to imagine him promising caucusgoers in Dubuque that he’ll “fix America’s finances” like he “fixed Indiana’s.” Unlike the rest of the Rust Belt, the state is still in the black.

But in his Toyota SUV after the event, the governor freely admits that “most of what we’ve done here”—reusing the paper clips from residents’ tax forms; narrowing the typeface on government documents to save on printing—“wouldn’t make much difference on the national level.” It’s a welcome confession. For decades, Republicans have railed against deficits and debt, but they’ve been too afraid of voter backlash to venture beyond marginal measures (“wasteful spending”). Daniels didn’t get the memo.

Let’s raise the retirement age, he says. Let’s reduce Social Security for the rich. And let’s reconsider our military commitments, too. When I ask about taxes—in 2005 Daniels proposed a hike on the $100,000-plus crowd, which his own party promptly torpedoed—he refuses to revert to Republican talking points. “At some stage there could well be a tax increase,” he says with a sigh. “They say we can’t have grown-up conversations anymore. I think we can.”

In my opinion, it's getting to the point where serious conversations can't be avoided without dire consequences. Unless voters are told the truth soon, and what steps have to be taken to face the almost insurmountable challenges, it will be too late to do anything. A grown-up conversation is exactly what's needed and no one - not the Democrats, not the Republicans, and certainly not the Tea Party - have done anything to begin it. Instead, the dialogue is dominated by stupid mosques and fiscal fantasies on both sides. Daniels is alone in looking at the real issues, such as Social Security and U.S foreign policy, and he's the only Republican who expanded health insurance coverage in a way that wasn't an unmitigated disaster.

Governor Daniels' proposed "truce on social issues" is instrumental to that happening. Nobody can be serious so long as everyone is swept away by inconsequential nonsense like abortion and gay marriage.

While I'm not convinced that Daniels would beat Obama in 2012, I'm sure that he's the only Republican who could. Not only does he bring Indiana back to the GOP, he could very well put the entire Midwest into play. If the Democrats have to fight to hold on to states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania which they can't win without, that leaves them fewer resources to defend places like Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada and New Mexico.

Mitt Romney might be a favorite son in Michigan, but that's no guarantee that he can win there, and he'll almost certainly be destroyed in the increasingly blue Southwest. No one has ever shown me how Sarah Palin can win states outside of McCain's 2008 electoral college minority, or even really tried to. A highly popular sitting governor from the Midwest with a proven record of fiscal discipline might be the only person who could beat a sitting president that's still more popular than Reagan was at this point in his term.

The only problem is getting him nominated. Other than political junkies like me and the New York-Washington journalistic class, no one knows who Mitch Daniels is. Given the history of the Republican primaries, Romney is the prohibitive favorite for the nomination. The only way to get around those two factors is for Romney and Palin to destroy one another in the early primaries and have Daniels come up the middle. And that's not a scenario that an unknown governor is likely to raise $100 million on.

On the other hand, if Daniels comes in second and stays off the Romney ticket, he'll be perfectly positioned for 2016, when he'll be a former governor with a spectacular record and high name recognition. And more likely than not the Tea Party movement will be either disillusioned or discredited by then.

2016 is the far more realistic option for Mitch Daniels. If he runs and loses the primaries in 2012, he avoids being tarred by what I think will be a populist driven electoral disaster in the general election and faces a fresh field where Romney, Palin and Gingrich won't matter. He'll also be running against a Democrat who will have to answer for the full Obama legacy.

I support Mitch Daniels because he's the only adult out there.