'The Un-Obama' doesn't run with the GOP pack
Respect for tea party has Mitch Daniels riding his own way
By John Kass
Chicago Tribune
May 16, 2010
He's a short, balding Republican who drives a Harley.
So Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels doesn't have that modern TV game show host/politician cachet.
But the conservative Daniels just might be the Un-Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
"It's not happening," he told me the other day. "People who run for president have to do it nonstop for years. And that's another good reason not to."
Sure. Yeah. OK. But still.
He's got the conservative chops for it. He's run a leading conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute, and worked for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Yet that's not what could separate him from the pack of Republican politicians so eager to face off against formidable President Barack Obama.
What separates Daniels from other Republicans is his attitude toward the populist tea party movement.
He doesn't want to tame the tea party. He doesn't want to own it. He wants to keep a respectful distance.
He agrees with the ideas expressed by this amazing gathering of independents, conservatives, Democrats and Republicans who are worried about the federal debt and the federal leviathan growing by the hour.
"But the tea party must be authentically separate and spontaneous, which I think it is," Daniels said. "I have carefully stayed away from it — not because I don't appreciate what they are doing, because I do — but because I don't want them tainted by too close of a relationship to either party.
"By being independent they have gotten the attention of their fellow citizens in a way that the existing parties, the Republican Party, let's just say, doesn't. I think it's been very constructive. I've said a little creative hell-raising on behalf of freedom is a good thing," Daniels said.
The tea party movement wasn't the only topic we discussed, in two separate interviews, for hours. We talked also of lowering taxes to allow the economically disadvantaged to seize opportunity.
Clearly, such talk is an unspeakable, foreign and perhaps illegal language in big-government Illinois, a state run by a bipartisan Combine that has put taxpayers $13 billion in debt.
So by focusing only on the tea party, I may be accused, and rightly so, of slicing a chunk of Daniels' views to help examine my own.
Unlike many of my media colleagues, I don't think the tea party movement is a terrible, frightening idea. It's fascinating. The unctuous Republican response to the tea party is as intriguing as the Democratic slander of it.
For the past year or so, as citizens began using the tea party idea to scare big-spending politicians, the predictable happened.
They were immediately savaged in the media, scourged on editorial pages, mocked with sexual innuendo on national news broadcasts, all because they dared question the growth of government.
Naturally, the tea party folks were branded as lunatics for suggesting that Obama's health care plan would cost more than advertised. Apparently, the Congressional Budget Office is peopled by madmen as well, since the cost of Obamacare continues to grow before it even begins.
And when labeling the tea party activists as crazy didn't work, they were viciously branded as racists, to demonize them.
But what about the Republican half of the story?
The parade of Republicans sucking up to the tea party movement in some symbolic washing of its own past sins is just as nauseating.
Sarah Palin, the erratic conservative now favoring leather tops, seems to be campaigning for tea party house mom, brazenly eager to appropriate it as her auxiliary. And a parade of others led by Mitt Romney also try to cozy up, as do personalities on Fox News.
Only a few years ago, Republican media cheerleaders clapped their hands furiously, like so many wind-up monkeys with cymbals, to advocate an oxymoron called "big government conservatism."
What interested me about Daniels months ago was that he was willing to publicly chastise his own party, saying congressional Republicans "lost their way, and lost their birthright" for their addiction to overspending.
"People need to pay attention to the fact that the state — that is, the federal establishment — has massively intruded on private freedom, just in the last year," Daniels said.
"And I think the folks in this little movement have done a better job than the Republican Party did, or could have done. Republicans make these criticisms and it's seen as predictable and partisan, even if it's true. And it is. That's why I think it's just fine if the tea party folks keep their distance and their own identity."
What worries me is that it seems 51 percent of the population has figured out how to use government to muscle the other 49 percent and take what they want.
"There are those who said democracy can work only when you have certain virtues," Daniels said. "Self-reliance, personal responsibility, willingness to set aside personal gratification. And when those atrophy — the Founding Fathers were worried about this — when those virtues weaken, then the whole enterprise is threatened."
Is that where we are now?
"Maybe the tea party is an early sign," Daniels said. "The strain of independence and love of liberty is still strong in the country. I think it is."
And I don't think we've heard the last from Mitch Daniels.
jskass@tribune.com
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