A month from now, Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, will probably be a declared candidate for President. His candidacy, if it comes off, will test the (rather dubious) hypothesis that Republicans might be willing to forgo some of the visceral pleasures of an eighteen-month-long Hate Week in exchange for nominating someone capable of appealing to moderates and other infidels.
On Tuesday, at the Gilded Age Upper East Side mansion that houses the nascent Bloomberg View, Daniels lunched with a baker’s dozen of journo-pundits ranging politics-wise from rightish (Peggy Noonan, Ramesh Ponnuru) and leftish (Michael Kinsley, Josh Marshall) to neitherish (Mark Halperin), and outlet-wise from mass market (George Stephanopoulos) to niche market (me). Afterward, the informal consensus of the leftish contingent was summed up in this exchange:
Better for the country, that is, in case Obama loses. The tradeoff is that Daniels would be harder to beat.
Daniels is unobtrusively friendly. He doesn’t get defensive or suspicious. He is relaxed, and being around him is relaxing. He doesn’t throw off the crackles of craziness—or weirdness or megalomania or suppressed something (rage, fear, insecurity, resentment)—that, to a greater (Palin, Bachmann, Gingrich, Trump, Paul) or lesser (Huckabee, Romney) degree, you get from all the rest. (Huntsman is probably unweird, too, but I haven’t seen enough of him to judge.)
Daniels will be, if not a one-issue candidate, certainly a one-theme candidate, the theme being fiscal responsibility, the deficit, the debt—all that stuff. “My brethren haven’t stepped up,” he said. By this he meant—I’m summarizing, not quoting— that the current G.O.P. candidates (a) haven’t gone after defense spending with any seriousness, if at all, and (b) can’t admit that because deficits occur when expenditures exceed revenues, a bit more of the latter, not just a lot less of the former, might be in order. To be sure, he dismissed Democratic demands for letting rich folks’ income-tax rates revert to pre-Bush levels as bad-for-business “theology,” and he supports the basic Ryan framework of lower marginal rates plus closing (mostly unspecified) loopholes and deductions. But unlike Ryan, who would use all the money from loophole-closing to cut tax rates, Daniels would use some of it to cut deficits. The net result, he claimed, would be more revenues, with the rich paying more, and a larger share, than they do now. Feeble? Perhaps, but he is a Republican.
As such, he is a big advocate of means-testing the “safety net,” including Medicare and, I gathered, Social Security. I piped up that universal programs like pensions and health care promote social solidarity, and that if the problem is that the programs give rich people resources they don’t need, the solution could be to recover the extra money through taxes. He replied that any suggestion that well-off Americans wouldn’t be as eager to support programs that benefit only the poor as they are to support programs that benefit themselves amounts to “cynicism” and is unfair to “the American people.” (Actually, the fact that Medicare is so much more popular than Medicaid suggests that American people are a lot like other people—i.e., part of fallen humanity. But I didn’t want to haggle about “exceptionalism,” so I let it pass.)
Daniels has famously called for a “truce” on social issues like abortion and marriage. He said yesterday that while those issues are “important,” and that he himself is “pro-life,” solving the fiscal mess will require difficult compromises, and the polarizing animosity that social issues provoke makes it harder for Republicans and Democrats to work together. He defended his signing last week of an Indiana bill to defund Planned Parenthood without visible enthusiasm, arguing that there are hundreds of other organizations in the state that provide birth control services.
On foreign policy, he said that he’s a “water’s edge” kind of guy. He is sure that the President is in a position to know a lot more about what’s needed in Afghanistan than he is. He said he didn’t think Obama had “made the case” for the Libya intervention, though this doesn’t mean there is no case. Pressed to say something critical about Obama’s foreign policy, he said that he was “uncomfortable” with the President’s “apology tours.” But he didn’t look comfortable saying it.
Jamie Rubin asked him a clever question, right out of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”: if he had just one phone call to make about some foreign policy issue and he could call either Richard Lugar or John McCain, which would it be? After a little hemming and hawing, he said that he is “always comfortable” talking with Lugar. Though of course he respects McCain, too, he hastened to add. Maybe he was just being nice about his state’s senior senator, but I hope he was expressing a preference for diplomacy (Lugar’s M.O.) over warmongering (McCain’s).
Asked about what else he was doing while on the East Coast, he said he was going to Washington to accept an award from the Arab American Institute. “I happen to be one,” he said—an Arab American, that is. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Syria. Somehow I hadn’t registered that aspect of Daniels’s background before. I guess it makes Daniels even less likely to traffic in the kind of disgusting, racially-tinged, Muslim-baiting, xenophobic hate-mongering that some of his “brethren” (and sistren) have flirted with.
Asked the Katie Couric question—about his reading habits—Daniels said that he reads plenty on the Web but the only dead trees he pays money for are The Wall Street Journal, the Sporting News, and, um, The New Yorker. So feel free to discount my generally positive impression of him. I found his affect reassuring. To all appearances, his temperament is undoctrinaire even if some of his economic views aren’t. When it comes to red meat he seems to be a vegetarian.
