A Successful Conservative

October 26, 2009

The reform-minded conservative
By Frank Donatelli
October 26, 2009

Imagine a two-term Republican governor from a state carried by Barack Obama who turned an $800 million deficit into a $1.2 billion surplus by cutting overhead and bringing sound business principles to his state’s government even as he provided new health benefits for poor citizens. Imagine no longer. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels accomplished this and more, and he did it all while enacting the biggest tax cut in state history.

Despite a long career in public service, Mr. Daniels is not nearly as well-known as some of his colleagues. He worked for several years on Capitol Hill as chief aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar and served former President Ronald Reagan as political director. After a 15-year stint in private business, Mr. Daniels became former President George W. Bush’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and then won back-to-back gubernatorial races in 2004 and 2008 in Indiana. His second victory was won with the biggest vote total of any candidate for any office in state history.

Despite his relatively low public profile, Mr. Daniels has been a successful, reform-minded, conservative governor. He took office in 2005 with a huge deficit and state spending growing at an unsustainable 6 percent rate.

But Mr. Daniels is not one to kick the can down the road. He immediately went to work finding savings wherever he could. Cost-cutting and businesslike practices cured the state’s operational deficit, but Indiana, like virtually every other state, also faced a huge shortfall in capital infrastructure funds. Mr. Daniels tackled that with the largest public-private partnership in U.S. history, a lease of the Indiana Toll Road, which brought the state nearly $4 billion for investment in transportation plus billions more to modernize the Toll Road itself.

In an interview, Mr. Daniels explained the impediments to conservative reform. “One is the public-sector employee unions who benefit from higher government spending and oppose pro-taxpayer reforms such as contracting for basic services.”

There is also the need to convince employees and state legislators who are often “far more comfortable with preserving the way things have always been rather than seeing what we could do to make things better.”

To read the entire column, please visit The Chairman’s Corner on the GOPAC website by clicking here.