What Mitch Daniels Would Have Brought to the GOP Primary

Ezra Klein:

Would so many commentators be so positive on Mitch Daniels if he wasn't running for president? Probably not. As George W. Bush's budget director, Daniels helped craft and sell the Bush tax cuts even as he lowballed the cost of the war in Iraq. Together, those policies were the central legislative drivers behind the surpluses of the 1990s into the deficits of the Aughts. If Daniels was running -- and particularly if he was running a campaign based around the national debt -- he'd have a lot to answer for. But there's nevertheless good reason to lament Daniels' absence from the race. Over the past two years, many in the GOP have taken their opposition to Obama's policies so far that they've tipped into a kind of denial about the underlying problems themselves. Republicans have a plan for opposing the Affordable Care Act, for instance, but nothing for covering the uninsured. They have attacked both Obama's stimulus proposals and the very idea of Keynesian stimulus proposals, but that's left them with few answers for the unemployed. Daniels, however, was charting a different course.
In a series of op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Daniels broke with the pack and began challenging Obama's policies by promoting solutions of his own. In September of 2010, he published a call for a second stimulus based around a payroll tax cut and full expensing of capital investments made by businesses. Both policies later turned up in the December tax deal. In February of 2011, by which time "repeal and repeal" had become the Republican Party's consensus health-care policy, Daniels wrote an article laying out six reforms that he thought could make the Affordable Care Act more appealing to conservatives, or at least to him. You didn't have to agree with Daniels' policy proposals to prefer his style of constructive engagement to the "just say no" attitude that had become dominant in the Republican Party.

I am with Ezra here.  Even though I think Mitch Daniels is a nicer version of John Kasich, I'm glad he was willing to propose some actual policy ideas, and to accept that taxes may have to go up.  The Republican party has been so taken with living in their own little make-believe world, it is refreshing to see somebody actually engage with the real world.  Somebody has to ignore the party base and recognize that government has an important function in civil society.  Daniels was as close to that as I've seen so far.  I think in the end, Daniels is just one of the many Republican governors in the Midwest trying to drag his state down to the level of Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.  They seem to think that cutting education will benefit the state, and that lower tax rates and wages will lead to more business investment in their state.  I have my doubts.