Daniels portada en The American Spectator

El Gobernador Mitch Daniels es portada del número de noviembre de la revista conservadora The American Spectator. En un artículo de tres páginas, W. James Antle se pregunta si América está preparada para tener un Presidente que emprenda fuertes recortes en el gasto.

Mitch the Knife

(...) The Weaver Popcorn Company's website advertises this fact as a "kernel of truth": their business was founded -- and is still based in! -- Indiana. But CEO Mike Weaver didn't come to talk about microwave popcorn. At the moment, he is more interested in touting another Hoosier product for possible national consumption: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels.

Weaver says Daniels is usually "the smartest guy in the room" and a true "servant leader" who gets things done for Indiana. "He's also very modest," Weaver adds. "Almost to a fault." Indeed, Daniels professed surprise that he's about to be the subject of another magazine article. "Did you run out of other things to write about?" he asks. But Daniels thinks the country could use a little humility from its leaders, a sense of realism about Washington's financial and metaphysical limits.

Call it a humble domestic policy. "We are approaching a moment of Republican responsibility," Daniels avers. The central question is whether the GOP can govern as well as it can campaign against Democratic profligacy. At dinner with a group of conservative intellectuals and journalists in New York -- "I'm surprised I don't have a rash," he says of his two days in the city -- he argues that the focus must be on making the federal government fiscally sound again.

"The Democrats are better positioned to do this in a Nixon goes to China sense," Daniels says. "But that's purely theoretical. It won't happen. There's no interest." Bill Clinton isn't president anymore and the era of big government was never really over. So the challenge of balancing the budget, getting control of the national debt, and reforming the country's sagging entitlements falls to the Republicans.

The Republicans have seldom been equal to the task. Party leaders have made a serious effort to reduce federal spending exactly three times since World War II: the "Do Nothing" Congress of 1947-48, the Congress that came in with Ronald Reagan in 1981-82, and the Gingrich Congress of 1995-96. In the last two cases, the results were short-lived. In the first, the Republicans were promptly relieved of their majority by the voters in the next election.

GOP bigwigs have gotten the message. When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a bold plan to tackle the entitlements crisis, few Republicans came to his aid. Most of his colleagues preferred a campaign document that largely confined its critique of federal spending to earmarks while engaging in a little demagoguery about Democratic Medicare cuts. Opposing Barack Obama is one thing. Cleaning up after him -- and fellow spendthrift George W. Bush -- is another.

THAT'S WHERE MITCH DANIELS comes in. Members of the Republican spending-cutters hall of fame include such flinty Ohioans as Robert Taft and John Kasich. Perhaps it's time to look next door to Indiana, where Daniels has one advantage over the Buckeye budget hawks: executive experience that might come in handy on the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But are the American people ready for a leader who says less is more?

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