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?
So you don't know that being Evangelical and/or a regular Church going Christian, or being a Synagogue attending Orthodox Jew is the best measure for being social conservatives?
Did you think that the social conservatives were the atheists and the people that don't attend church?
If you think those grandmas in sneakers and women pushing carriages are libertarians or South Park conservatives you’re crazy. Stop letting the media determine your mind. They want to fool you into thinking these people don’t believe in social conservative ideas. It’s the media’s dream that the TEA parties hate social conservatives and you have crawled into bed with them.
Just because the TEA Party movement decided to focus on one area does not mean when the individuals go into the voting booth they have forgotten what this country is about. TEA party members are even more conservative than republicans. More fiscally conservative, more constitutionally aware, and more socially conservative. Any liberaltarians coming along for the ride are fine but quit dreaming that old liberal dream about ridding the world of godly people because liberaltarians do not run the TEA party movement, god loving individuals who believe in the Constitution and personal responsibility do.
Sit back and enjoy the ride and let the real conservatives do all the hard work.
Darn! You really let us down, again. More groups, more categories, no concepts, no principles, no ideas. Drat!
Who is it that you think mostly make up the voters known as social conservatives?
If you say so.
So what are you saying, you’re bigoted against people who live in the Midwest, as well as against people in the South?
Dude, you gotta stop being such a hater.
When I write a vile post about Midwesterners like you did about working class and poor Southerners then you can look into that possibility.
Grow up and lay off the childish posts.
Not so. When President Bush tried to fix the Social Security mess via privatization, social conservatives stabbed him in the back (apparently removing the Ponzi-scheme subsidies and putting it on a "get out what you pay in" basis was "anti-family" for some reason).
They pick up their marbles and went home the first time the opposition threw a little dirt? Yeah, that's just the kind of "energy" I want behind me....
But do they like haggis?
They're called Catholics.
Social Conservatives have been a mainstay since 1980. This despite the willingness of “Ford” (moderate) Republicans to sabotage their agenda. Bush’s whole campaign was based on the image of a candidate who despite his elite background was “one” with the broad middle class, and a reformed playboy who had come clean. The question that immediately came to mind was: are we being played again for a sucker? The reaction was not unlike that of libertarians who HAd been played for a sucker by George H.W. Bush, and who DID bolt en masse, support Ross Perot, and DID elect Bill Clinton in 1992.
They're also the ones who will cut and run the first time the opposition slings a bit of mud. Don't take my word for it; one of the most staunch socons on this board said so back in Msg#54:
Recall that Bush almost lost in 2000 when on the eve of the election they Democrats sprung their little drunk driving trap. Lots of people who saw Bush as a “church” types stayed home because they felt betrayed.
Ah, but the problem is, I never once mentioned "Southerners" or "working class" in my original comment. I made no sectional reference whatsoever, and my comment - if you would bother to stop having a hissy fit for a minute and actually *think* about it - was most definitely not about "working class" people, since working class people don't, among other things, sit around collecting a welfare check and watching Jerry Springer (they "work," which is why they're called "working class").
These are things YOU *assumed* about my post, and the fact that in making the assumption, you identified Southerners and working-class people, shows that it is YOU, not me, who implicitly associates these groups with being welfare-consuming trailer trash.
In fact, the only example I gave of the type of person I was talking about was Levi Johnson - who is definitely not working class (since he appears to not be into "working" eh?), and who lives about as far from the South as it is possible to be and still inhabit territory of the United States of America.
Sorry, but YOU'RE the one with anti-Southern, anti-working class prejudices, since you're the one who assumes these groups to be welfare monarchs.
Like I said, stop being a hater.
Grow up and lay off the childish posts.
Childish? What's childish about pointing out that your logic is flawed, and your implicit premises are prejudicial?
Ah yes, the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
One of the most misunderstood, and therefore misapplied, logical fallacies, as you're demonstrated for us.
Sorry, but my post is based on empirical evidence garnered from dealing with this type of folk for over a decade. NTS simply doesn't apply.
Sort of like the libertarians who took their marbles (the ones they hadn't lost, I suppose) and went to Perot, thus giving us Clinton?
See post 135 to see who was voting for Gore and against Gore in 2000.
Social conservatives voted against Gore, anti-social conservatives voted for Gore.
You are denying that this was about Southerners, not that it would not be disgusting to mock any working class and poor people like this, even attacking their faith and mocking the name of Jesus, or as you say “Sweet Jeeeeeesus”?
You really don’t sound like a social conservative with this kind of vitriol and bigotry, you seem to despise Southerners and America’s largest retailer for some reason.
“Another group that I’ve noticed this to be the case with, at least as far as assumptions based on stereotypes are made, is poor rural whites - you know, the stereotypical trailer-dwelling, truck on blocks in the front yard, Wal-Mart-shopping, good ol’ boy types. Fact is, these folks generally are not religious. They may go on TV and say stuff like “Sweet Jeeeeeesus, I thought that thar tornader was gonna take ma trailer!” but that doesn’t mean you’ll find these folks in church on Sunday in large numbers. Actually, you won’t. Trust me, I’ve done a lot of door-to-door and visitation in a lot of neighbourhoods, and this type of folk talk a lot about God and they sound religious, but don’t typically have much to do with religion.
Yet, when they vote Democrat so that the welfare will keep flowing, you then have people like meadsjn squawking about all these “SoCons” are voting Democrat. Except these folks aren’t SoCons. They aren’t really against abortion, and to the extent that they would oppose gay marriage, it would not be out of any moral or philosophical principles, but instead would be because “them queers jus’ ain’t raaaht.”
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