Christ on a Cracker, who was touting this guy as Presidential material the other day?
Now, Mr. Riley was asking the above rhetorically, for reasons that will become apparent as soon as you get to the link at the end of this post, but for the record, the ones we were most recently snickering about for said touting were Ross Douthat and Michael Grunwald. (Come 2011 or so, we might want to want these reminders handy.)
To understand why Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, would be such a bad nominee, even for a Republican, just ask one of his long-suffering constituents, who's at his best when he's most irritated.
3 comments:
Yeah... I'm sure that loser is suffering soooo badly in Indiana. Woe is them! I'm sure they're just about to rent a UHaul to move to MI or IL, where liberal Dems and liberal GOP have the state into the ground. Well, until they realize that the prosperity brought about in IN is because of Mitch's balanced approach to government.
Let's Recap:
- 70% approval rating
- Focus on Education, promoting a State Superintendent who agrees with Obama & Arne Duncan about Charter Schools (GASP!)
- Capping Property Taxes (WILDLY popular)
- Chiding a much less than progressive legislature, led by an incompetent hack, led by special interests who resist progress
So your suffering dissident critiques Gov Daniels speech and largely do so about things that are less than substantive when it comes to policy.
Right. Suffering so badly. They apparently still have access to the internet. Must not be that bad.
Thanks for stopping by, Brad Rateike.
Piffle.
1) GOP vanity poll. No one in Indiana can believe Mitch Daniels really has a 70% approval rating.
2) Slashed education spending in 2004-06; now--to the extent he's even involved in the budget process--has proposed flatlining it for the next two years. The newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction--it's no longer an appointed position--is a proponent of charter schools. I'm not sure why this is an accomplishment, unless you happen to favor them yourself, but the Legislature is already balking at the price tag, and the incontinent (and Democratically-initiated) Indianapolis charter school system has already gone from pie in the sky claims to explaining why doing almost as good as the public schools is a major accomplishment.
3) Indiana's property tax explosion was caused by two things: a) a late-90s court ruling that the old, agriculture-based formula was unconstitutional, followed by b) the Daniels administration, and the then-Republican-controlled Legislature, failing to adjust the formula in 2005, which would have been politically unpopular, followed by an astroturf tax revolt, followed by the cap. We now have the second highest sales tax rate in the nation, as a result, and the state has fobbed off obligations onto local governments in order to make its own books look good. Wildly popular? Yes, among a certain segment of the populace that doesn't understand what's actually going on.
4) Please. Daniels spent '08 getting re-elected (and leading the GOP ticket that lost to Barack Obama) by massive campaign advertising that misstated the "Indiana economic miracle". Now, six months later, we've got a 10% unemployment rate, worst in the region after Michigan, and Daniels was missing in action through the entire legislative session, which will now end in him calling a special session. Even the lapdog Indianapolis Star called it a defeat for Mitch. But, please, don't let any of this discourage you from running the Miracle Man for President in '12.
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