A Republican Surprise

Mitch Daniels, Republican of Indiana, has become America’s best governor. Is that enough to drive a presidential campaign in 2012?  From Russ Douthat at (yes!) The New York Times:

Set a group of plugged-in conservatives to talking presidential politics, and you’ll get the same complaints about the 2012 field.


Mitt Romney? He couldn’t make the voters like him last time ... Sarah Palin? She’d lose 47 states ... Mike Huckabee? Better as a talk-show host ... Tim Pawlenty, Jim DeMint, Bobby Jindal, David Petraeus? Too blah, too extreme, too green, and stop dreaming ...

But murmur the name Mitch Daniels, and everyone perks up a bit. Would he win? Maybe not. But he’d be the best president of any of them ...

“I’ve never seen a president of the United States when I look in the mirror,” Daniels remarked last week, after officially inching the door ajar for 2012. You can’t blame him: At 5’7”, the Indiana governor wouldn’t be the tallest man to occupy the White House, and he’d be the baldest president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. If Romney looks like central casting’s idea of a chief executive, Daniels resembles the character actor who plays the director of the Office of Management and Budget — a title that he held, as it happens, during George W. Bush’s first term.

Since then, though, he’s become America’s best governor. In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician. During the fat years of the mid-2000s, while most governors went on spending sprees, he was trimming Indiana’s payroll, slowing the state government’s growth, and turning a $800 million deficit into a consistent surplus. Now that times are hard, his fiscal rigor is paying off: the state’s projected budget shortfall for 2011, as a percentage of the budget, is the third-lowest in the country.

But Daniels hasn’t just been a Dr. No on policy. His “Healthy Indiana” plan, which offers catastrophic coverage to low-income residents, aspires to eventually cover 130,000 people, about a third of the state’s long-term uninsured. He’s pushed targeted investments in kindergarten programs, the police force and the child welfare office. And he’s been a pragmatic free-marketeer, rather than a strict ideologue. His controversial decision to lease the Indiana toll road reaped $3.8 billion for the state. But when an attempt to outsource welfare enrollment went awry, Daniels yanked the system back into the public sector.

If this portrait sounds suspiciously glowing, keep in mind that I saw the governor last Monday, in between the CPAC gathering of movement conservatives and the White House health care forum. In both cases, the contrast made Daniels seem particularly appealing.

Unlike the politicians who spoke at CPAC, Daniels eschewed triumphalism about conservatism’s prospects. “I think a lot of Republicans are over-reading all of this,” he said. “They’re a little ahead of themselves, a little too giddy.” What his party still needs, and doesn’t have he said, are the answers to “the ‘what’ question — what are we about, what are our answers to the obvious problems the nation has?”

Unlike the Republicans at the health care summit, he balanced criticisms of Obamacare with candor about the problem of the uninsured. “This is a very real issue, and we were determined to have a constructive approach to it — but one that would be affordable.” Healthy Indiana, he went on, is “incredibly popular with the people who are a part of it. I get tearful hugs from people who just want to tell me that it’s brought them peace of mind.”

And unlike both CPAC-goers and his party’s leadership, Daniels was blunt about the challenges of deficit reduction. “There’s been some very healthy hell-raising going on in the country,” he said of the Tea Parties. “But to my knowledge, nobody’s gotten up in front of those rallies and explained what’s going to have to happen.” His ideal approach to the deficit would look like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, all spending restraint and no new taxes. But one way or another, deficit reduction “has to be done” — even if “you have to take the second- or third-best method.”

All this honesty might evaporate on the campaign trail. And if it didn’t, would Daniels have a prayer? He’s admired by elites, but unknown at the grass-roots level. He’s a social conservative, and his gubernatorial campaigns have played the populist card successfully — but he lacks the built-in constituencies of other candidates. And his years’ carrying water for the Bush administration’s budgets would doubtless be used against him in the battle for the Tea Partiers’ affections.

For a Daniels candidacy to catch fire, what’s left of the Republican establishment, currently (if reluctantly) coalescing around Mitt Romney, would have to decide that he’s the better pick. That would mean gambling that the best way to defeat the most charismatic president of modern times is to nominate a balding, wonky Midwesterner who reminds voters of their accountant.

Stranger things have happened.