If you can’t see him going any farther, why do you think you’ll need to do something to prevent it?

Seems to me, if you really believed he couldn’t go any farther, you wouldn’t bother.

But you don’t really think that, do you?

If Daniels gets in the race, he will probably gain a lot of very good early endorsements. Christie has already made it known he’d likely endorse him. Paul Ryan has touted Daniels publicly several times. John Boehner just brought his name up after being asked about Christie. Dick Armey has said he’d endorse him.

And there will be more.

Will that be enough to make him a primetime candidate? I don’t know. But I certainly think, if you oppose him, that you’re right to think you’ll need to be active in trying to blunt his candidacy.

He said that the social agenda — from the left and the right — needs to be put on the backburner in order to create the political space we’ll need to address the fiscal crisis.

Now, I’m guessing he realizes that the social left will do no such thing. They aren’t going to vote for him anyway and, either way, they’re not going to be burying their hatchets.

Some say that’s an argument against a “truce” — I’d say it’s an argument for it. Their agenda will get nowhere if the other side is playing neither offense nor defense.

They can push forward all the bills advancing social liberalism they want. They’ll all be summarily ignored or vetoed. The truce would be in effect whether they chose to recognize it or not.

So, no, he wasn’t telling SoCons to pound sand or shut up or whatever. He’s just saying that the SoCon (and SoLib) agenda would be put in “pause” mode.

Again, the model here is the Tea Party — which is officially silent on social issues. The fact that it is neither threatens nor helps the social conservative agenda.

I think Daniels quiet competence presents a very good contrast with Obama’s flashy emptiness.

I keep hearing people say: “Oh, it’s not that I wouldn’t vote for him because he’s short, bald, and folksy. It’s that *other* people wouldn’t vote for him for that reason.”

I don’t buy it. The electorate, when it fires incumbents, tends to “fix its mistakes” in so doing. Who contrasts more starkly with Obama than Gov. Daniels?

If he runs, I think he’ll surprise a lot of people. He’s being sharply underestimated right now, including by a lot of Republicans/conservatives.

For one thing, acat, the Indiana House has been under Democratic control for most of his tenure as Governor. The first two years, I think Republicans held a very slim (1 seat, maybe?) majority. But, for the 4 years in between, it was controlled by a pretty hostile Democratic Party.

Indiana is actually, within its borders, still a pretty Democratic state….even if it tends to vote for Republicans nationally.

We had Democratic governors for 16 years prior to Daniels’ election, for example. Most city governments are heavily Democratic.

Gov. Daniels got heavily involved in the statehouse races in 2010, putting up a few million bucks from his own PAC to get the majority he’d need to push through a sweeping education reform agenda that he’s been gunning for since he took office.

And he got every single aspect of it.

I know a couple of Republican representatives very well and they speak extremely glowingly of Gov. Daniels.

…the social conservative movement. The idea was to break more kids free of the aggressively and increasingly secular public school system.

Daniels just signed a bill that will end up letting tens of thousands of low/moderate income Indiana kids attend private school — including religious ones — with financial assistance from the state…and monies diverted from government schools.

You’d think social conservatives would be doing cartwheels over somebody who worked for years to successfully implement such a thing.

Are you saying he should’ve basically lied about how he felt? Because I’d say that comes dangerously close.

To say one thing and do another is a form of lying — or, at least, false advertising. And, yes, politicians do it all the time, alas.

He’s not saying he disagrees with social conservatives on their issues. Heck, he just signed the nation’s most restrictive law regarding the public funding of Planned Parenthood. His record on social policies is not one that should give social conservatives pause.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that his social policy record is better than Reagan’s was as Governor of California.

The point of the “truce” is merely that we need to temporarily remove divisive issues unrelated (or only tangentially related) to the fiscal crisis if we’re to have any hope of ameliorating it.

I think he’s right about that. You’re free not to.

But, for heaven’s sake, don’t say that he should’ve “kept his mouth shut” and pursued such a truce without telling us about it.

We should welcome such blunt talk from our political leaders.

I don’t think he was under any illusion that SoCons would receive the comment with a shrug of the shoulder and a step in line.

But I really think people should:

A) Consider his record on social issues. It’s a pretty consistently conservative one — and moreso, IMO, than a number of past Republican presidential candidates.

B) Consider the intent of the idea. Personally, whatever it means politically, think it will ultimately prove unworkable in practice. The moment a judicial seat comes available, so long truce.

That said, the intent is simply that we might rally around what unites us (well, not all of us) rather than continue fighting at full-throat about what else divides us.

He really thinks the fiscal problem is that big of a deal and poses that kind of a threat to our national interest. That’s why he equated it to WWII — it’s not an inapt comparison, IMO.

The Tea Party isn’t *threatening* to social conservatism in the least. Nor is it likely to be particularly helpful, not directly anyway.

I guess, if anything, it’s likely to prove marginally helpful in that it has tended to aid conservative candidates. And it stands to reason that victorious conservative candidates will aid the social conservative agenda more than harm it.

But, the point is: the Tea Party is essentially silent on social conservatism. It is, for all intents and purposes, operating under the very same “truce” that Daniels is talking about.

Yet few SoCons strike me as wary of it — nor should they be.

Thanks, needed a chuckle.

And I agree with everything you said. The Tea Party was never intended to be a comprehensive political coalition designed to field candidates for election, etc.

While it’s obviously true that most people in the TP movement are, also, broadly conservative, it doesn’t seem inclined to boot people out because they support abortion or gay marriage or strategic arms treaties with Russia.

Granted, Daniels is promising that the SoCon agenda would get no legislative traction if he’s elected. And I can certainly understand why that would be off-putting to SoCons.

But I think if they take the long view of such an arrangement, on the understanding that the social liberal movement would be equally neutralized for that period of time, and that the Daniels gambit could be detrimental to the long-term interests of broader liberalism, they might do well to give it a second thought.

While he’s never actively pushed much in the way of social legislation, neither has he ever stood in the way. And, yes, this recent Planned Parenthood bill is a good example.

But, then, he’s never really approached Indiana voters about the idea of a “truce” on social issues — which would be pretty pointless anyway, given the state’s ideological makeup.

He’ll have to elaborate about what exactly it would mean in practice. As I said elsewhere, I think there are inherent logistical obstacles to it: chiefly the judicial nomination process. And, let’s face it, if he doesn’t at least promise to nominate conservative judges, his candidacy will go nowhere fast. Even Giuliani did that.

I’m pretty pumped by my growing suspicion that he’s going to run. I’ve been following him closely for some 7 years now — and I’m convinced that he’s the real deal.

Not, anyway, in the absence of evidence that he was wrong. And he certainly isn’t going to do so simply because of a backlash — which I’m sure he anticipated.

I know a lot of people want him to. But it isn’t going to happen. He made it clear that he’d thought long and hard about what it will take to amass the political will to tackle the budgetary problems. And just because some people don’t like what he came away with doesn’t mean he should change his mind.

If you’re looking for a political weathervane who will say all the things you want them to say to get your vote, you probably are better off looking elsewhere.

But if you want somebody who will lay it down straight, even if it’s something you don’t want to hear…..

I don’t doubt for a second that most people who wear the TP mantle are social conservatives. That’s not my point.

My point is that the rallying ideas underlying the movement have little or nothing to do with social issues.

It’s kind of like the NRA and abortion. It’s probably safe to say that most NRA members are also pro-life. That doesn’t mean the NRA is a pro-life movement.

The Tea Party is a movement borne of fiscal policy. That makes it neither a threat to nor a vehicle for the movement of social policy.

And that’s not mutually exclusive of your point that many/most Tea Partiers are, also, socially conservative.

And that’s why I say that I think some people prefer it that way. It’s almost like Stockholm Syndrome: “at the very least TELL us you’re going to move our agenda forward.”

Now some guy comes along and says “Social conservatives, I’m with you….but we’ve got an urgent matter that requires more unity and less division. So we need to table your issues temporarily while we attend to it”…

….and people are ready to tear his head off for being honest and up front.

The proof is right here: people are saying he should’ve just kept his mouth shut instead of stirring the pot….in other words, lie to us all.

…this is why I really think that:

A) We’d be better served by finding and discussing the merits of the candidates we like rather than finding and discussing the supposed demerits of the candidates we don’t like.

You don’t get very far in politics — and certainly not as an executive — without making compromises of one kind or another. And it’s easy to find and point out “flaws” in virtually all candidates.

B) Either we grow past being doctrinaire or our movement (which is well described as having 3 main factions) will eventually fall apart.

There’s a reason that the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Socialist Party, etc. are politically irrelevant.

I’d really rather the conservative movement not join them in their irrelevancy.

While social conservatism isn’t so much my “thing”, I profoundly respect those for whom it is — and share many, if not most, of their basic tenets.

But they’ve got to do a better job being politically savvy….and that means dropping the sledgehammer.

Even if you completely and vehemently reject it, it’s certainly no cop out. He’s saying exactly what he means and telling us why…leaving it to all of us to either accept it or reject it on its merits.

Sometimes I think that politicians lie to us because, at the end of the day, we’re more interested in what they tell us than what they do.

And, FTR, I don’t think he’s aiming at social liberals with this. He’s not that stupid. I think he’s aiming at people who are essentially unengaged in the culture war….but are still inclined to share our general fiscal policy outlook.

He’d have to be a complete idiot to think that committed social liberals are going to be attracted to such a message. And I don’t think he’s a complete idiot.

I live in Indiana and have followed his entire tenure very, very closely. And I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about with “socially-liberal, high-dollar programs”.

Social liberals here hate the guy — and with good reason.

He said we should be considering cuts in defense spending.

And that’s pretty much all Kristol & Co. need to disqualify somebody’s conservatism.

Rand Paul said the same thing — I guess he’s not a “true conservative” either.

We’re going to eat ourselves alive if we’re not careful. We’ve got to get beyond this doctrinaire garbage and realize that pragmatism is not the enemy of our agenda.

If we ever come to understand that, I think conservatism has a bright future. If we don’t, I think our movement is going to implode.

But I really think that the movement, by and large, has come to so commonly confuse pragmatism with apostasy that we don’t even make much effort to distinguish between them anymore.

I don’t put much stock into most notions coming from the left these days. But one that I do is the notion that Reagan — the real one, not the mythical one — would have a hard go of it in the modern conservative movement.

Anybody who goes back and really scrutinizes his record in both Sacramento and Washington will easily see that he understood the value of pragmatism — that not every step taken was a step forward in moving the desired agenda.

The left figured this out a long time ago and it has served them very, very well.

For some reason (and I have a couple ideas as to why) we haven’t figured it out — yet, anyway. I hope we do…because I see dark days ahead for conservatism if we don’t.

I’ve long suspected that Republicans are incented to keep social issues more or less where they are — which gives them a fair amount of standby political leverage.

So we’ve just become accustomed to Republican politicians running for office, giving the appropriate lip service to social matters, and then governing in ways that don’t exactly match up to their rhetoric….and then grumbling about how voters were taken for granted, etc. etc.

Here’s a guy leveling with people about the auspices under which he’d seek office…and they’re ready to send him to the gallows for saying he’d do what pretty much all Republican presidents do.

That’s what you’re missing. That’s what a lot of people are missing.

The point of the “truce” is that, if successful, it opens the door to building a larger political coalition that will have been constructed expressly for the purpose of tackling the debt problem.

While it’s easy to confuse that with good ol’ expediency and opportunism, it’s actually something completely different.

If we’re interested in driving a stake into the heart of liberalism — and, yes, that very much includes social liberalism — we’ll take him up on the offer.

It’s pragmatism, not apostasy.