What’s the scoop on Daniels from your perspective?
Daniels has been an excellent governor. Even though our state has been whacked by auto industry unemployment (we have a lot of plants and suppliers here) our state budget is still in the black.
He’s revamped our Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gotten property tax reform through the legislature, beaten back the state employee union, kept tax rates low, and had NO scandals.
He is a fiscal conservative, but pretty silent on social issues. He got reelected last November overwhelmingly even though Indiana went narrowly for Obama. He worked for Reagan, then Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals after Reagan left office, then as Bush II’s budget director in his first term, before returning here and running for governor.
Indiana’s finances were in a horrible mess before he was elected. He slashed and cut, sold the toll road to a European consortium and is funding road repairs with the interest on the money, did a one-year tax increase which has since gone, told state employees that there will be NO pay raises, and privatized some areas of government. Now we are in the black, even in the middle of the recession, unlike most other states.
He has been tireless in getting companies to locate here and makes several trade mission trips to Asia and Europe every year.
I don’t know that he could be persuaded to run. He is very protective of his daughters and his wife, and I am not sure he wants to put them through the meat-grinder of a campaign against the Chicago thugs.
If he runs, however, I would support him. He really knows budgeting and finance and might be able to cut a lot of spending in Washington. There was a reason Bush nicknamed him “The Blade.”