Executive Temperament in Evidence: Mitch Daniels

Earlier this month, I posted a piece documenting Barack Obama’s incapacity as an executive. I followed up with a brief examination of Bobby Jindal’s record as Governor of Louisiana and, then, with a short discussion of a display of vigor and dispatch on the part of Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey – both of whom nicely illustrate what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he wrote in The Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Today, I will take a brief look at Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana.

Daniels is an accomplished man with considerable and varied experience in both the public and the private sectors.

On his father’s side, Daniel’s grandparents were Syrian Christians, and he has been honored by the Arab-American Institute for the work that he has done on behalf of Arab community in this country. He was himself born in Monangahela, Pennsylvania, where his paternal grandfather ran a pool hall and, on the sly, reportedly made book. As a child, he lived not only in Pennsylvania, but in Georgia, Tennessee, and Indiana, where his parents settled when he was ten. After graduating from a public high school in Indianapolis, he attended Princeton University. There, for a time, this straight arrow appears to have succumbed to the Zeitgeist In 1970, he spent two nights in a New Jersey jail after being arrested for marijuana possession. Nine years later, however, he was awarded a law degree by the Georgetown University Law Center in DC.

Daniels got his start in politics working for Richard Lugar – initially when Lugar was mayor in Indianapolis and later when that worthy was elected to the U.S. Senate. For a long time, Daniels was Lugar’s right-hand man. He ran the latter’s first three senatorial campaigns; and, from 1977 to 1982, he served as his chief of staff. In 1983, when Lugar was elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Daniels became its executive director.

In 1985, Daniels left Lugar to join the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, where in time he succeeded Haley Barbour as chief political advisor and liaison. When he returned to Indiana in 1987, Daniels did so as chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank then in financial trouble; and three years later, after having put Hudson on a sound footing, he went to work for Eli Lilly, where he soon became President of North American Operations and eventually Senior Vice-President for Corporate Strategy and Policy.

In January, 2001, Daniels went back to Washington, DC to become George W. Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, which made him an ex officio member of the National Security Council and, when it was set up, of the Homeland Security Council. At the time, he was known as an advocate of fiscal restraint, and Bush, who was not as profligate at first as he later became, described Daniels in public as “The Blade” and referred to him in private as “My Man Mitch.”

Daniels’ resume up to this point is impressive, but it would not be of paramount interest had he not returned to Indiana in the summer of 2003 to launch a gubernatorial campaign aimed at ousting the Democratic incumbent. Indiana’s budget at the time was deep in the red, and Daniels, who was elected in November 2004 with 53% of the vote, vowed to bring it into balance.

This “The Blade” accomplished in short order. Upon election, he created an Office of Management and Budget for the state, and then, under his direction, the men with the green eyeshades went to work. Within a year, they had turned a $600 million deficit into a $300 million surplus, and Daniels had begun paying down Indiana’s enormous debt. Four years later, the state was running surplus of $1.3 billion; and, in 2008, Indiana’s Governor ushered through the legislature a bill cutting property taxes on the average house by more than 30%.

Along the way, Daniels decertified the public service unions, reduced the number of those employed by the state by 14% to a level last seen in 1982, shifted most state employees to health savings accounts, introduced a pay-for-performance plan within the bureaucracy, reorganized the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, brought an end to social promotion within Indiana schools, and leased the interstate turnpike stretching across the northern reaches of the state between Ohio and Illinois to outside investors for a cool $3.9 billion, which was immediately sequestered in an escrow account, where it is used for road construction elsewhere in the state (and nothing else).

In November 2008 – when Barack Obama defeated John McCain and the Democrats took the state house and senate in Indiana – Daniels bucked the trend and was re-elected Governor by an 18% margin. In the process, he picked up 20% of the African American vote, and he won a majority among younger voters.

These days, Daniels’ approval rating oscillates between 60 and 70% – which is remarkable given that he is a balding, mild-mannered, unassuming man inclined to travel through the state on a Harley, stop at a diner, and sit down to chat with the patrons. His political success may have something to do with Daniels’ mastery of the technology of communications. His personal version of Reality TV – which is called MitchTV – is a local hit. But his popularity has even more to do with his achievements.

Mitch Daniels may have the demeanor of a staffer, and he has, indeed, done a great deal of work in that capacity. But – like Bobby Jindal, who is 39, and Chris Christie, who is 47 – “The Blade,” who is 61, is a man of executive temperament ready, willing, and able to take charge. Thanks to his stewardship, Indiana is solvent, and it is one of the nine American states with a triple-A bond rating. Moreover, it has begun attracting venture capital; for the first time in decades, people are moving into state; and, though it has only 2% of the national population, Indiana can boast that it garnered 7% of the new jobs created in the United States in the last year.

I cannot say whether any of the governors I have looked at in the last two weeks would make a suitable presidential candidate. But this much is clear. In the great crisis we now face, we are saddled with a President more inclined to dither, play golf, party with celebrities, and punt than to take charge and display energy, vigor, and dispatch when confronted with emergencies requiring decisions on his part. Whatever defects they may possess – and each is no doubt defective in some way – Jindal, Christie, and Daniels would not dither or punt. Each in his way exemplifies responsibility – the virtue singled out in The Federalist as distinctively American — which is no small thing.