Soren Dayton has a post over at Next Right extolling the virtues of Indiana's Republican Governor, Mitch Daniels, primarily because he succeeded in cutting the number of employees of state government and balancing the state's budget. Balancing budgets is a good idea, depending on how you do it, but even if you think small government is a priori a good idea, the number of employees cut seems like a terrible way to measure the success of an enterprise. (You wouldn't hear that a business had fired 5,000 employees and say, well, that there's a well-run firm!)
So I went looking for some kind of evidence that Indiana state government is actually performing effectively, and, what do you know, Daniels was selected by Governing magazine as one of their top public officials of the year. Among their reasons: privatizing some transportation infrastructure, pushing a public-private corporation for job creation, putting together a subsidized health care plan for the uninsured and -- possibly my favorite thing -- ramming through an initiative to have Indiana adopt daylight savings time. (Hoosiers, enlighten me: Why is this controversial? Some kind of agricultural objection?) He's also done some things that seem, from my liberal perspective, to be awful ideas: privatizing welfare, for one, and using health savings accounts to achieve his health reform aims.
Nonetheless, it's an impressive and ambitious governing record that would serve him well if he seeks higher office. (Apparently, he's not interested). But despite his conservative bona fides (he's been an adviser to Dick Lugar and Ronald Reagan and was, before running for governor, George W. Bush's OMB director), part of Daniels' plans have involved raising taxes. He raised cigarette taxes to pay for health care, raised sales taxes while capping property taxes (a regressive trade-off that might have Proposition 13 style consequences in the future), and put proposed a surtax on the top 1 percent of earners to balance the budget, leading Grover Norquist to apoplexy.
Dayton observes, "No wonder people are talking about this guy for President. He has actually run something successfully." But in so doing, he violated one of today's key conservative tenets. I wonder if Dayton thinks Daniels' pragmatic record would survive a GOP primary?
-- Tim Fernholz
See Also: Mark Schmitt argues that Republican governors are the future of the GOP.
