Mitch Daniels - Anti-Obama

Mitch Daniels is a dark horse for the Republican nomination for President in 2012. Mona Charen has some nice things to say about him today. He should get KT's nod with this quote (I also agree):

“If I could wave a magic wand, and change just one thing, it would be to guarantee that every American child could grow up in a two-parent home until the age of 18. That would solve maybe three-quarters of our problems.”

However, Daniels has famously called for "truce" on social issues. From a Weekly Standard interview:

Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.

Indeed, this is the view of the Tea Party. Notice that Daniels never says that social issues aren't important, just that the magnitude of the deficit spending and economic crisis requires our attention, first and foremost. That Mike Huckabee came out swinging and arguing against this view of priorities disqualifies Huckabee for the nomination, in my judgment as an ideologist for the Tea Party movement.

Here are a couple of interviews in which Daniels makes eminent sense.






Mitch Daniels seems a bit charismatically challenged, but he has an impressive record. Exit question, can the 2012 Republican nominee win with a "my record" is my charisma approach? My answer is a resounding yes, people will be tiring of the faux charisma and failure of the current administration.