Governor Daniels, it is not too late to change your mind and get into this race, and for the good of your country you should do so.
In the past three years President Obama and his Democrats have increased the national debt by nearly 50% – nearly five trillion dollars – more than the all of the first 40 presidents combined. He did so in the context of systematically working to attack, undermine, and ultimately destroy our capitalist economic system and replace it with a statist centrally planned economy. And if he is reelected and has four more years to continue on this path, it is likely that he will do so much damage to this country that it will be irreversible. This is especially true if he is able to replace even one conservative Supreme Court justice with another leftist in the mold of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan and thereby do away with the last possible defense of any constitutional restraints on the power of the federal government.
And so defeating Barack Obama is not only a moral imperative; it is necessary to the survival of our country.
As things currently stand, there are two viable candidates for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Neither of these candidates are what the our party and country need.
Mitt Romney is an unprincipled opportunist who adopts whatever positions he must to appeal to the electorate he faces in any given election. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, Romney actually ran to the left of Ted Kennedy. Later, as Governor of Massachusetts – the only election he has ever won – he imposed exactly the kind of individual health insurance mandate on the people of his state that Obama imposed on the entire country. And Obama developed this scheme with the assistance of Romney’s former aides. Romney now says that he opposes ObamaCare on Tenth Amendment grounds, but he stands behind the individual mandate on policy grounds even as the rest of the Republican Party is working to reverse it by any means necessary.
Could Romney defeat Obama? Yes. But if he does, there is nothing in Romney’s history or character that indicates that he will work proactively to transform the current federal government behemoth back to its constitutionally limited size and scope. After four disastrous years of Barack Obama and the resulting damage that he has done, American needs much more than a caretaker president without core conservative convictions.
Neither is Newt Gingrich the answer. To his credit, Gingrich does have the distinction of being one of only two truly transformative conservative leaders in the past half-century (along with Ronald Reagan). Gingrich did what no one of his generation ever though possible: After forty long years, he led the Republicans into the majority in the House of Representatives (and did so with sufficient coattails to elect a Republican majority in the Senate as well). And to his credit, he did succeed in enacting some very important conservative reforms despite a Democrat in the White House, including tax cuts, balanced budgets, and welfare, telecommunications, immigration, and bankruptcy reforms. He deserves enormous credit for these important accomplishments.
That said, one wonders how much more could have been accomplished over the twelve years that Republicans remained in control of the Congress if Gingrich hadn’t allowed his ego to get in the way of effective leadership. Gingrich’s ego was on display for the world to see when he gave an absolutely disastrous address to the nation, sitting on a corner of his desk with his hands on his knees, giving America a list of recommended books to read. His later proclamation that he shut down the government because he was slighted by not getting face time with President Clinton on the flight to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral undermined the entire Republican agenda. And when Clinton made effective use of the bully pulpit to convince the American people to blame the Republicans for the government shutdown, Gingrich backed down, and the entire conservative agenda in Congress was thereafter emasculated.
Gingrich’s leadership style was so ineffective and offensive even to his own ranks that after less than four years in power, his own deputies stage a coup against him that failed in the short term but succeeded in weakening him to the point that he resigned after the next election. The fact that one of the leaders of that coup attempt, John Boehner, was elected by the Republican Caucus to serve as Speaker as soon as the Republicans regained control of the House this year speaks volumes about Newt’s legacy in that body.
Since leaving office, Gingrich has continued to adopt policy positions that run the gamut from conservative to almost leftist. Indeed, he famously sat in a loveseat with Nancy Pelosi in a nationally-televised commercial advocating for government action to combat mythological man-made global warming. (This man who supposedly is on the cutting edge of scientific and technological trends apparently was unaware that the Earth has cooled for each of the past 15 years.) Gingrich has since disavowed that commercial as the stupidest thing he’s done in recent years, but he has never explained why he did that commercial in the first place and whether he actually believes in man-made global warming and that government action is needed.
Gingrich now holds a significant lead against Romney not only nationally but, more importantly, in most of the early primary states. But Republicans everywhere are holding their collective breaths waiting for him to once again trip over his own ego and make some stupid remark that will cause his campaign to crash around him. If it happens after he secures the nomination, he will not only ensure the reelection of Barack Obama but also jeopardize the Republicans’ control of the House of Representatives and opportunity to take control of the Senate. And, given some of the leftist positions that he has taken in recent years, one must wonder if he would be as reliably conservative as President as he was as Speaker.
Neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich are what America needs at this pivotal moment. But you, Governor Daniels, are that man.
When the rest of the country was tumbling into a massive recession, your low-tax policies and steady hand kept Indiana largely out of the crisis. And as Republicans everywhere were getting defeated for being part of the problem, you were reelected by the people of Indiana as a sincere principled conservative.
You are not flashy. You don’t have Mitt Romney’s made-from-central-casting looks or Newt Gingrich’s acerbic wit. What you have is what George Will aptly described as “low-key charisma of competence.” You inspire confidence because when you speak, though you speak quietly, you speak from core conservative conviction, and you speak truth to power.
America needs your combination of experience, qualification, record of success, electability, and dependability to do what must be done to restore the nation.
And it is not too late.
As Rhodes Cook of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball points out, the change in the rules for the Republican nominating process provides an opening for a good candidate to enter the race as late as February and still be viable. This is because the states holding primaries and caucuses prior to March are no longer winner-take-all, which means that the delegates from those states will be split among several different candidates. If a strong candidate enters the race by February and can win some of the contests starting in March that are winner-take-all, he could overcome the early frontrunner(s) and win the nomination.
Governor Daniels, Republicans across the nation remain dissatisfied with our current options, as evidenced by the fact that Mitt Romney has never been able to secure support from more than 1/4 of Republicans in any poll, and Newt Gingrich, now at his apex, cannot secure support from more than 1/3 of Republicans. We continue to desire a candidate with high-level executive experience and a proven track record of implementing conservative policies based on consistent core conservative principles who we can believe will be able to defeat Barack Obama and restore our nation.
You are that man. It is not too late to get into this race, and you should do so. Your country needs you.
