First casualty of Indiana Dems’ run
Governor Mitch Daniels’ potential presidential bid.
“Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should to drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures.” …
If the Indiana House Democrats get what they want through this tactic, what’s to prevent them from using it again and again every time they think they’ll lose on a big issue?
I had been open-minded about Daniels’ “truce” talk — no matter how much a Republican presidential candidate talks about the importance of social issues, 75 to 90 percent of the president’s time from January 2013 to 2017 will be spent on economic and fiscal crises and managing a dangerous and rapidly changing world. But a concession to Democrats on major reforms like these will spur a lot of talk about Daniels’ toughness, or whether he’s too conciliatory to an opposition that has gone completely off the rails, or more accurately, out of the state….
UPDATE: Fairly or not, many readers are interpreting this news as a sign that A) Mitch Daniels doesn’t want to run for president or B) he isn’t running for president.
Daniels is an extremely tolerant man — he remarried his wife (and mother of his children) after she left him and married a surgeon out in California. But this may be a line too far for Republicans who want to fight this fight.
That is too bad. I think that the USA needs someone like Mitch Daniels to become President. America needs to both shrink the size of the government and make it work more effectively. Both of which Daniels has done as government in Indiana.
Walter Russell Mead has an interesting take on getting more from the government sectors of the economy.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/02/22/race-to-the-bottom/