Posted on 08/10/2010 2:28:39 PM PDT by GOPGuide
Alternate headline: “Mitch Daniels’s dark-horse presidential bid dead on arrival.” Here’s what he told the Weekly Standard per the profile Ed flagged yesterday:
Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”
And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state. He serves as an elder at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, in inner-city Indianapolis, which he’s attended for 50 years.
John McCormack pressed him to elaborate on what he meant by a “truce” and Daniels couldn’t offer any specifics. (“Everybody just stands down for a little while, while we try to save the republic.”) Enter evangelical leader Tony Perkins to lower the boom:
“Not only is he noncommittal about his role as a pro-life leader, but the governor wouldn’t even agree to a modest step like banning taxpayer-funded promotion of abortion overseas — which [former] President Bush did on his first day in office with 65% of the country’s support. Let’s face it. These aren’t fringe issues that stretch moderate America. They’re mainstream ideals that an overwhelming majority of the nation espouses. I support the governor 100% on the call for fiscal responsibility, but nothing is more fiscally responsible than ending the taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion promotion. More than 70% of our nation agrees that killing innocent unborn children with federal dollars is wrong. Yet stopping government-funded murder isn’t a “genuine national emergency?” We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.”
Other religious conservatives are piling on too: “Something like this will cost him any consideration from one of the key constituencies of the Republican Party,” says the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. Ramesh Ponnuru is right that Daniels is kidding himself if he thinks he can avoid these landmines as president — the first Supreme Court vacancy will thrust him right into the middle of it — and it’s amazingly tone-deaf for an aspiring nominee to propose a “truce” on abortion given how many pro-lifers equate it with murder. But even so, I’m sympathetic to his willingness to prioritize America’s entitlements crisis over everything else, even at the expense of alienating a core wing of the GOP. The hard lesson that Republicans seem to have to learn and re-learn is that, thanks to Roe, there’s not much a GOP president and Congress can do legislatively about abortion, in which case why not temporarily de-emphasize it as a political issue if it’ll buy crucial centrist votes needed to redress a fiscal emergency? (In fact, isn’t that an unstated assumption of the tea-party movement? “Yes, foreign policy and social issues are important, but economic stability is now Job One.”) Unless Daniels means that he’s willing to compromise on a pro-choice Supreme Court nominee, which would be pure political suicide, I’m not sure which social issue he’s supposed to be willing to go to the wall for even if it means detonating a potential political compromise with Democrats to reform social security and Medicare. If McConnell and Boehner come to President Daniels and say they’ve got the votes for a balanced-budget amendment but in return the Dems want the Defense of Marriage Amendment repealed, Daniels is supposed to tell them to hit the bricks?
Sounds to me like what he’s really saying is that we should accept the status quo, whatever it may be, on social issues until entitlements are back on the path to solvency. As for abortion, I suspect his way of squaring the circle will be to argue that, in fact, because fiscal solvency is priority one and because we need lots of young workers to support our federal Ponzi schemes, the moral argument for opposing abortion is actually a very sensible economic argument too. Exit question one: Is this guy done for, assuming he ever had a chance to begin with? Exit question two: He’s pretty much a textbook example of the sort of candidate who’d benefit from a California-style free-for-all primary, isn’t he?
Thanks for checking my profile page. I hope you learned something, such as that the Republican Party was in 1892, and still is supposed to be, pro-American and anti- Free Traitor.
As for the “Nicaragua canal”, it served the USA well almost a century, through two world wars many years of peacetime shipping, until the commie Carter gave it away for nothing.
Well you guess wrong again. It's very leftist and communist of you to try to lump individuals into your narrow, predefined "groups".
What’s next? Do you have a train waiting to take those “other” groups of your imagination to the gulags or concentration camps?
You know, Southerners should be highly offended that you're assuming they're all on welfare, are shiftless, have illegitimate babies, and vote Democrat. I can't describe how disgustingly bigoted against Southerners you're turning out to be, what with your horrible assumptions about them.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Don’t worry, ansel’s going all William Jennings Bryant on me, too. I think he wants to crucify me on a cross of gold.
LOL, so you don’t exist, because if you exist, then you fit one of those categories and I think that we all know that it is a category made up overwhelmingly of liberals.
I seriously doubt that you fit into one of the categories that is majority conservative.
This really is a revealing look at you, it must be difficult for you to have to live in the south.
Yours is the classic mindset of collectivist tyrannical governments demonstrated over the past century and more, to the tune of more than a hundred million murders.
What are you talking about? You're the one who's dissing Southerners and assuming that they're all a bunch of welfare addicts and bastardists.
The South's okay, but I have to say, it ain't the Midwest.
Thank you, I got it right.
Daniels, now I imagine Lugar told him to say all of that.
No, didn’t Goldwater and Howard Baker compete over who cast the tie-breaking vote for “giving away” the canal?
I think that we can assume that you are in one of the categories that is made up mostly of liberals, I'm starting to wonder who you voted for in 2000.
The Oligarchy gets antsy when the peons and peasants start getting uppity.
The Mittster would appear to be history..he’s been unable to put the Palin’s back in Alaska....so their rolling him under the bus...
“Abortion has severe fiscal long term consequences....”
the consequence shrinking of the generations is responsible for the pressure on our politicians to open the borders.
the ramifications are manifold.
You don't know jacksh*t about what I like or don't like, or the same about any other person here.
I don't like you or your behaviors, and hope everyone reading recognizes your leftist tactics. I don't expect you to recognize it or to change. You're just a bigot -- look it up. Words mean things, and mostly not what you imagine.
You are a bigoted POS, determined to employ your commie, NAZI methods to pigeon-hole individuals into your imaginary "groups" and "categories". That is not a conservative trait.
Anybody dishonest enough to say this.
"Regardless, the fact is that either Social Conservatives are irrelevant in national elections, or more than half of them voted for Obama in 2008. Most of the same Social Conservative idiots that supported Huckabee also previously supported Bill Clinton, and about asmany of them supported Algore in 2000 as supported GWB.
Is someone with a deep hatred and bigotry towards the conservative voters and people of faith that make up the vast majority of that voting block.
Here this thread is at post #140 or so, and you still haven't articulated a single conservative principle or idea.
I believe you could, if you really, really tried. If you close your eyes and think for a few minutes, you might be able to squeeze one tiny little conservative principle or idea out of that reptilian pea-sized brain. Come on; give it a try, without any "categories", "groups", or labels. Just start with some generic concepts like "consent of the governed", life, liberty, property, individualism, etc., etc., and express just one single conservative idea. You can do it.
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