Indiana’s Daniels offers austerity as a virtue

Mitch Daniels might be the best-kept secret in the country as well as in his own Republican Party.

Except among the conservative movement’s cognoscenti, Mr. Daniels is not on the list of usual suspects in barroom and living-room speculation about likely 2012 Republican presidential candidates.

The second-term governor of Indiana hasn’t traveled much outside his state since he left his post as President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget director in 2003. Yet the former Reagan White House adviser talks with the libertarian- and conservative-sounding conviction that might be expected to grab the attention of even the most politician-disdaining activist in the emerging tea-party movement.

When the subject turned to taxes and spending at the recent Republican Governors Association meeting in Austin, Texas, Mr. Daniels made clear his dislike of both, but not out of the green-eyeshade miserliness that cartoonists — and opposition designers of TV campaign ads — long have used to stereotype the fiscal creed of Republicans.

Rather, Mr. Daniels’ parsimony is, in his eyes, the instrument by which elected public officials show their respect for the freedom of the individual.

“The essence of our nation is the protection of individual liberties,” he says in an interview with The Washington Times. “That means, for example, never take a dollar from a free citizen through the coercion of taxation without a very legitimate purpose.

“And then we have a solemn duty to spend that dollar as carefully as possible, because when we took it we diminished that person’s freedom. Otherwise, that citizen could spend that dollar on something he or she chose. This is an obligation of everybody who serves in government.”

There even appears to be some correlation between his words and his deeds.

Having been a manager in the worlds of business and politics for most of his 60 years on the planet, Mr. Daniels has the kind of experience any candidate thinking about running for the nation’s highest office would die for.

A Princeton graduate from a modest family background, he conveys in conversation the image of the quiet-spoken libertarian-populist for whom braggadocio is simply unthinkable. Getting him to talk about his accomplishments isn’t easy. “I want to look to the future,” he says.

Nonetheless, he has served as an administrative assistant to Richard G. Lugar, then the Indianapolis mayor and now a U.S. senator; executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP’s campaign fundraising and candidate recruitment organization; a political adviser in the Reagan White House; CEO of the brainy Hudson Institute; president of Eli Lilly’s North American pharmaceutical operations; and as OMB director for President George W. Bush.

He has been governor of Indiana since 2005.

Ask him if he will seek the 2012 GOP presidential nomination and he repeats his oft-stated “no.”

He says he has “encouraged a few good people to run and will continue to look for other people who may be able to frame the issues important to the country.”

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