Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Lion's Den

The commentators expecting Mitch Daniels to make a strong outsider run for the 2012 GOP nomination as a fiscal conservative underestimate the impact of Daniels' intentional snubbing of social conservatives via a "truce" on social issues. The idea is ill thought out in every respect. It took a couple weeks before Daniels clarified that the truce was with liberals -- who are not interested in any such thing. No explanation has been given why a legislature cannot act on economic and social issues both. Most importantly, socons know that people who think that way would always find a reason why urgent concerns of some other kind demand a "temporary" putting aside of social issues. If the economy was hot, the suddenly urgent issues might be inflation and infrastructure.
Socons cannot elect a nominee, but they can defeat one. By taking them on, Daniels has put a target on his back -- metaphorically speaking only, of course.
Now Jennifer Rubin has identified two other significant groups of Republican conservatives that Daniels is alienating. "National security hawks are concerned that he is sounding more Robert Taft (Midwest isolationist) than Ronald Reagan internationalist." Worse than that, although the whole rationale for his candidacy is his economic expertise, Daniels is not a tax cutter, as are the great majority of GOP fiscal conservatives. Says the Cato Institute:
"He's kind of a more of a 'trains run on time' kind of guy, like a balanced budget kind of guy. He wants the government to be efficient but he doesn't necessarily want it to be smaller. Other than his property tax cut, he hasn't cut state level taxes at all. He hasn't really even proposed to cut them. Indiana has an above-average business tax."

What's going on here? Is Daniels setting himself up to run a brave-speaker-of-truth maverick campaign, Daniels as the prophet challenging the established wisdom of his party and warning of the danger to come? This kind of campaign wins disproportionately large coverage and editorial raves from the New York Times and Washington Post but doesn't win nominations even in the Democratic Party (Paul Tsongas; Gary Hart) where their seal of approval is valued. Or by snubbing social conservatives does Daniels hope to become the Establishment candidate, taking over as frontrunner if Romney implodes? But while the GOP Establishment might silently cheer as Daniels disses social conservatives, they will not make him their candidate, because they do not support candidates who intentionally divide the party.

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