Via Politico
With a Wall Street Journal op-ed, an admiring Weekly Standard cover story and an upcoming Washington high-dollar fundraiser, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is slowly stepping into the 2012 presidential spotlight, even as he insists he isn’t looking to run.
In a wide open field, the GOP governor’s name keeps popping up despite the fact that — unlike many other potential candidates — he hasn’t aggressively promoted himself. Daniels hasn’t recently visited Iowa or New Hampshire, and his name isn’t always surveyed by national pollsters looking at the prospective field.
Daniels, however, has a following among those Republicans more focused on budget cuts than abortion and attracted to business acumen rather than ideology.
“We conservatives emphasize the need to cut government spending,” said Fred Malek, a powerful GOP fundraiser. “Here’s a guy who has a clear record of not only doing that but also making government work more effectively.”
“Daniels’s appeal is this — he’s the no BS candidate, the no-frills guy who doesn’t come off as a PR firm executive and intentionally doesn’t speak in poll-tested sound bites,” veteran Republican pollster Curt Anderson said. “Against the backdrop of the current president, this gives him tremendous appeal; that and the fact that he has an accomplished record as governor.”
With conservatives still sampling the unsettled 2012 field, Daniels’s two terms as governor have caught the attention of both Washington insiders and grass-roots leaders looking for competence and managerial skills, along with the political ability to compete against President Barack Obama.
Since Daniels became governor in 2004, Indiana has turned its $200 million deficit into a $1.3 billion surplus, paid all outstanding debts, doubled venture capital investment in the state and increased employment. All while reducing the number of government jobs in the state by about 15 percent by not filling vacant positions.
All of that attracted an extremely positive profile this month in The Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion-maker.
In the profile, Daniels is lauded for his ability to connect with voters, through his love of riding motorcycles and by eating catfish, without seeming inauthentic.
“Is such a thing possible?” senior editor Andrew Ferguson asks. “A famous and celebrated political personage, living life in the camera’s eye and not faking his sincerity? I wouldn’t have thought so.”
Daniels’s everyman appeal belies his experience and elite Washington connections.
He started his career as an intern to then-Indianapolis Mayor Dick Lugar and later followed Lugar to Washington to staff his Senate office. GOP strategist Ed Rollins plucked Daniels from Lugar’s staff to run President Ronald Reagan’s political shop after Haley Barbour, now Mississippi governor, left to start his lobbying career.
After his Reagan years, Daniels moved back to Indianapolis, where he helped revive the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank of which he was chief operating officer before President George W. Bush picked him to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
His career, both inside and outside the Beltway, has made Daniels plenty of friends, which is evident from the list of sponsors attending his June 14 fundraiser on the roof of the Willard Building, each of whom will contribute $5,000 to Daniel’s PAC.
Among those attending are former Secretary of Energy and Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), former European Union Ambassador C. Boyden Gray, General Electric Vice President Nancy Dorn and Republican National Committeeman Ron Kaufman.
Some of Daniels’s Washington experience isn’t an asset.
Among liberals, he is probably best remembered for declaring ahead of the invasion of Iraq that the whole operation would cost the United States $60 billion — only a fraction of even the yearly expenditures Congress has been approving since 2003.
Still, with his record of cutting government spending and closing deficits against a backdrop of exploding government expenditures and growing anti-Washington fervor, the notion of a Daniels candidacy is beginning to take root.
“Conservatives like him because he put conservative principles into practice in governing Indiana and succeeded,” Ed Morrissey, an influential blogger for the conservative site Hot Air, wrote in an e-mail.
“His fiscal conservatism appeals to the broadest expanse of the right, and Daniels hasn’t done anything significant to alienate any of the other constituencies of conservatism,” Morrissey continued. “In 2012, governing expertise is likely to be a big selling point, especially if Barack Obama ends up getting stuck with the image of incompetence.”
Other Republican governors — including Barbour and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, along with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — will make the same pitch.
Those close to Daniels say his casual Midwestern mien will prove to be an advantage over some of his prospective GOP opponents.
“Mitch’s appeal comes largely because he’s willing to talk to voters as adults,” Indiana Republican Party Chairman J. Murray Clark told POLITICO. “He doesn’t shy away from tackling big issues, and he doesn’t talk down when he explains his policies for tackling them.”
“The idea that someone who has worked at the highest levels of business and government could also so deeply and personally understand the feelings of everyday real people is a combination [that] makes for a unique capacity to lead,” Clark said. “He’s also willing to admit if something doesn’t work out the way he planned, and he course corrects from there. That forthrightness and adherence to results-driven policies earns him a lot of respect, even from people who may disagree ideologically.”
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