Is Indiana governor Mitch Daniels running for president? That
was one question on the minds of some of the 11,000 people who
attended the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political
Action Conference last weekend.
Daniels went to the CPAC and gave a terrific one-legged
stool presidential campaign address. The minimum number of legs for
a stool, however, as many people from the state of Indiana know —
Indiana has 154,000 milking cows — is three.
Daniels gave a sober, but not somber, 31-minute speech
which was interrupted by applause 42 times. Flown in from Indiana
on a friend’s plane, Daniels was relaxed, poised, Teleprompted,
and, yes, presidential, in part because a teleprompter prompts
people to think of presidents.
Daniels summed up his economic philosophy early on: “We
[Hoosiers] believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in
the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting
rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual — we
spend less money than we take in.”
The lefties, if they had been listening, would have been
scandalized to hear the governor say, echoing Milton Friedman:
“When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I
always reply: ‘Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of
corporate citizenship. If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone
else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those
non-profits we’re so proud of.”
Friedman also pointed out that you can only make money
(which the left thinks is greed) by serving people (which the left
thinks is the exclusive preserve of government).
Daniels said Indiana had cut property taxes to the lowest
level in America, and designed the health plans for both the state
employees and for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts.
And he spoke of Indiana’s intention to create a voucher program for
every low and middle income family in the state.
Having presented his bona fides, Daniels then addressed
the nation’s most pressing problem, what he called a new Red
Menace: the sea of red ink drowning the U.S. economy.
As the elections of last November indicated, that is now
the central concern of Americans: an economy incarnadined by the
hand of Barack Obama, the one we had been waiting for. Yet who
would have thought the one we had been waiting for to have had so
much red ink in him?
Daniels said we need to cut government spending, redesign
the tax code so it will promote private growth (flatter is better,
flat is best), deregulate, and stop denying ourselves the energy —
oil and gas — that is under our own
land.
He spoke about Americans “still on the first rung of
life’s ladder.” He urged the audience to “distinguish carefully
skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all
government.”
Then he asked for “thoughtfulness about the rhetoric we
deploy in the great debate ahead.” And, having thought for just a
moment himself, decided time was up: whereupon he announced that
“our opponents are better at nastiness than we will ever be. It
comes naturally. Power to them is everything, so there’s nothing
they won’t say to get it.” How do you speak truth when truth is
unpleasant?
Daniels also urged “great care not to drift into a loss of
faith in the American people.” saying “Americans are still a people
born to liberty.”
So far, so good, and very good indeed. Thirty-one minutes.
Forty-two applause lines. That’s a great speech. George Will,
introducing Gov. Daniels, said, “Our speaker has twice been the
right choice for Indiana. Some people think that the other 49
states deserve the chance to make the same choice.”
But other people aren’t so sure. Two legs of the stool
were missing: social policy and national security
policy.
Gov. Daniels said last year, as reported by Andrew Ferguson in the
Weekly Standard that to solve the economic problems, “the
next president would have to call a truce on the so-called social
issues.”
That may make sense, at first: if the country goes broke,
a lot of things will have to change. Perhaps the country will have
to economize by laying off the Supreme Court.
But even assuming solving the economic problem must come
first, how are we going to avoid rafting on Barack Obama’s great
rolling river of red-ink all the way to bankruptcy on the rocks of
entitlement programs?
Daniels said that Americans “are still a people born for
self-governance. They are ready to summon the discipline to… put
the future before the present, their children’s interest before
their own.” Fine, but putting children’s interest before their own
— even getting married and having children — takes character. And
the kind of people who have that kind of character tend to be
social conservatives.
The governor’s gamble may be that social conservatives
know he is one of them; and they may understand that he doesn’t
want to scare off those people who are concerned about the economy
but are not social conservatives. Perhaps.
The other missing stool was national security — foreign
policy and defense. The governor’s only reference to national
security was to say that even national defense, which he called
“the first and most important mission of government,” could not get
a free pass when it came to cutting the budget.
The same day the governor spoke, the Egyptian government,
our ally for decades, had fallen, casting the whole Middle East
into confusion at best, chaos at worst.
Now the cons and the neocons, and the realists and the
idealists, and the State Department long-timers and the Freedom
Agenda proponents are all arguing about what we should have done,
and what we should do.
A reasonable position for Gov. Daniels would have been to
cut through that fog of argument and call for increasing
the defense budget. Another position would have been to call for
not cutting it, and notwithstanding that the Pentagon’s
balance sheet is as unyielding of useful data as a black
hole.
Daniels understands that we cannot balance the budget by
eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. But neither can we wait around
for the Defense Department to produce a clean balance sheet before
buying the defense we need.
Hoosiers are not much affected by illegal immigration, nor
is Indiana involved in national security. Hoosiers also know their
state government can’t determine national abortion
policy. Nor can Indiana do much to affect
today’s culture, which drives so many of the social issues. It may
be possible therefore to avoid discussing social issues when
running for governor of Indiana. But not for
president of the United States.
Because Gov. Daniels avoided both the social issues and
the national security issue at CPAC, many observers thought it fair
to conclude from his speech — a very good speech indeed — that he
is not running for president. Or, at least, not running for
president yet.
