“Mitch Daniels: serious, adult, not a wingnut, and articulating a lot of conservatism’s good ideas without a lot of its bulls**t. PLEASE RUN.”
I wish I’d paid more attention to Governor Mitch Daniels when I was living in Indiana during my time at Notre Dame, but I didn’t really care much about state politics because I knew I wasn’t going to stay. Now, Daniels has emerged on the national stage, and looks to me like, by far, the best substantive choice in the potential Republican presidential field. I need to learn a lot more about him. I certainly don’t agree with him on everything. But I really hope he runs.
Tonight, Daniels spoke at the conservative convention CPAC. (Insanely, I can’t embed their video of his speech. Huge, huge New Media #FAIL.) He focused almost exclusively on the looming debt crisis, which he likened to an enemy invading our shores, an existential threat that we must all unite in order to defeat. He called red ink the “new red menace.” As I said, I don’t agree with every word in his speech, but there’s plenty to like, including:
Lost to history is the fact that, in my OMB assignment, I was the first loud critic of Congressional earmarks. I was also the first to get absolutely nowhere in reducing them: first to rail and first to fail. They are a pernicious practice and should be stopped. But, in the cause of national solvency, they are a trifle. Talking much more about them, or “waste, fraud, and abuse,” trivializes what needs to be done, and misleads our fellow citizens to believe that easy answers are available to us. In this room, we all know how hard the answers are, how much change is required.
He went on to add — speaking at a conference of conservatives and Republicans, remember — that even defense spending must be on the table. (!!) Oh, and did I mention he called for means-testing Social Security?
And then, a bit later, these points:
We must display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on the first rung of life’s ladder. Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts. Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some. …
We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government. After all, it is a new government we hope to form, a government we will ask our fellow citizens to trust to make huge changes. …
Lastly, critically, I urge great care not to drift into a loss of faith in the American people. In speech after speech, article upon article, we remind each other how many are dependent on government, or how few pay taxes, or how much essential virtues like family formation or civic education have withered. All true. All worrisome. But we must never yield to the self-fulfilling despair that these problems are immutable, or insurmountable.
Finally, this shot at those who prefer ideological purity to practical results (*cough*TeaParty*cough*):
Change of the dimension we need requires a coalition of a dimension no one has recently assembled. And, unless you disbelieve what the arithmetic of disaster is telling us, time is very short. [PANIC!!! -ed.]
Here I wish to be very plainspoken: It is up to us to show, specifically, the best way back to greatness, and to argue for it with all the passion of our patriotism. But, should the best way be blocked, while the enemy [i.e., collapse due to debt] draws nearer, then someone will need to find the second best way. Or the third, because the nation’s survival requires it.
Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers. King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation disappeared. Winston Churchill set aside his lifetime loathing of Communism in order to fight World War II. Challenged as a hypocrite, he said that when the safety of Britain was at stake, his “conscience became a good girl.” We are at such a moment. I for one have no interest in standing in the wreckage of our Republic saying “I told you so” or “You should’ve done it my way.”
We must be the vanguard of recovery, but we cannot do it alone. We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities. We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean. Who surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter. Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise ship accessory.
The second worst outcome I can imagine for next year would be to lose to the current president and subject the nation to what might be a fatal last dose of statism. The worst would be to win the election and then prove ourselves incapable of turning the ship of state before it went on the rocks, with us at the helm.
That last point also works as a shot at those who would support the election of an incompetent like Sarah Palin in the service of some cultural grievance. What we need above all is not flashiness or folksiness, but competence.
I don’t think Daniels can win the Republican nomination, if he even runs for it. He’s too low-key, uncharismatic, and non-demagogic. He’s also too short. Above all, he’s far too willing to challenge certain orthodoxies and call bulls**t on the most egregious right-wing nonsense. (To be clear, I don’t think his liberal mirror image could win the Democratic nomination, either. There’s a reason most politicians aren’t very honest: for the most part, honesty doesn’t pay.) I suspect he may not even run, because he knows he’d lose. I’m not sure he has the fire in his belly.
But, from what I’ve seen, America needs someone like Mitch Daniels to carry the conservative flag. An honest, sane, grownup representative of true conservative ideas. An election between him and Obama would be a real choice.
Pingback: Tweets that mention My Man Mitch? -- Topsy.com
Interesting guy, saying a lot of smart things, but I doubt he ends up running.
A few side comments worth making:
“even defense spending must be on the table” — what does this even mean? Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is already falling like a rock. Gates has already begun making the “easy” cuts (by the way, do not conflate “easy” with “smart”: ending F-22 production = easy, not smart; ending the STOVL F-35 and F-35 second engine = smart, definitely not easy) such as discontinuing production lines that were already past their forecasted completion dates, and calling for major trimming of the DOD officers corp. The real challenge with defense spending is tied to two main areas: New weapons development and acquisition; and pay and benefits for service members (active and retired).
First, weapons development and acquisition. Every new development program overruns, this has been true for decades, and nobody has discovered a magic bullet for it. So long as the U.S. is committed to being the most technologically advanced military in the world, we are going to bleed dollars trying to stay ahead of the technology curve. The standard budgetary responses of cutting funding, rebaselining (i.e. slipping the schedule to ensure the cost of near-term work stays within available funding), and shuffling the program management or acquisition leadership usually cause more harm than good.
Second, service benefits. Reforming the VA and DOD healthcare sounds wonderful, but aside from the usual political cliches that makes it difficult to tinker with these sorts of things (You want to make cuts to benefits? Do you HATE America and those who serve the country?!?!?), we face the same problems here as the country at large does with the exploding costs of pensions and healthcare. Solve the bigger problems first (i.e. fix Social Security, Medicare / Medicaid, and pension funding), and fixing those problems as they relate to the military will be relatively easy.
So bottom line, the idea that defense spending is loaded with pork, sacred cows, and other people’s oxes that should be gored is a rather simplistic view of things. Sure, defense spending should be on the table, but only because we need to fix it, not reduce it. So long as conservatives and libertarians and liberals can agree that the defense and security of the country is one of (if not the) primary function of government, taking the axe to the defense budget is likely to cause more harm than good. We’re better off getting government to stop spending money on the things it shouldn’t be tasked with doing (such as housing and feeding people, and paying for their retirement and healthcare) than messing with its core duties.
As for means-testing Social Security, I question why a liberal should rejoice at a conservative saying this. Means-testing Social Security would represent a philosophical shift that totally opens the door to Social Security becoming a welfare program rather than an entitlement. At that point it’s much easier to make major cuts to the scope and cost of the program and evolve it into a Latin American-style system that mixes welfare and IRA (read: privatized) elements. Ted Kennedy would be rolling over in his grave hearing purported Democrats toying with the idea of turning Social Security into a means-tested welfare program!
I close with this minor observation: Mitch Daniels’ comments about building a pragmatic coalition to defeat the red [ink] tide, versus setting forth an agenda based on militant ideological purity, are — to put it simply — stating the obvious. What Mitch would do well to ponder is to understand that this year’s CPAC, and his important address at that gathering, would have carried zero significance had the Tea Party not come into its own and completely changed the political tide over the past two years. Rail at the Tea Party all you want — without them, you’d still be beholden to the Pelosi-Reid-Obama “statist” agenda. Methinks a bit of humility and respect is in order.
“So bottom line, the idea that government spending is loaded with pork, sacred cows, and other people’s oxes that should be gored is a rather simplistic view of things.”
Fixed that for ya.
“Sure, defense spending should be on the table, but only because we need to fix it, not reduce it.”
Meanwhile other people feel the same about, oh, education, transportation, Medicare, oh EVERYTHING. The attitude of sure cut spending but not on the stuff I find important means that nothing will change.
Rand Paul already solved the deficit issue.
However, it is nice now to read Republicans talking about things that could raise up Americans. For the past decade all they ever said was “terror”, “war”, “military”, “Iraq”, “Iraq”, “Iraq”, “republicans have kept us safe”. Seems like, if nothing else, Obama has sobered this nation up to the BS republicans had been shoveling into the fat faces of lazy stupid americams for ohhhhh the past decade.
Now if Americans actually can figure out that electing republicans won’t change a damn thing about the wasteful spending in Washington, since they pretty much destroyed the economy and hemorraged debt when they were in power– THEN Americans will just be fat.
David, when everything is important, nothing is important. Start with what is constitutionally required, and suddenly a whole lot of the government is above and beyond what is necessary. Education, transportation, healthcare, etc. are all issues best left to the States (and local governments) and the people. Defense? Absolutely necessary at the federal level. If you want to cut defense, you need to answer very basic questions first: What are your strategic defense priorities? Our current strategic goals involve: maintaining land, air, and naval superiority over all comers; establishing dominance over — and ensuring peace on — the high seas; and equipping a military with the personnel and weapons necessary to strike anywhere globally in pursuit of targeting terrorists or containing (if not outright disarming and removing) dictators. Believe you me, that costs money. If you want to cede technological superiority to Russia and China, leave the various regions to police their oceans, and abandon any pretense of projecting power globally, then sure, hack away and prepare for global chaos.