Well, Fox has been promoting Mitch Daniels for president for more than a year. I mean, every time the 2012 elections come up -- and with the Comrade in office, the election comes up all the time -- someone on Fox mentions Mitch Daniels. So I looked him up.
He's 62 years old, was born in Pennsylvania, graduated from Princeton, and headed up pharmaceutical company Eli Lily & Co., which is headquartered in Indiana. Daniels served as chief of the federal Office of Budget Management under George W. Bush. Back in Indiana, he ran for governor and has served 1.5 terms there -- considerably improving the state budget.
Under his watch in Indiana, the state toll road was privatized (great idea!), a state-wide school voucher program has been established (great again!), and the teachers' union no longer has collective bargaining rights and teachers' raises, etc., are determined on merit.
On the personal side, his wife, Cheri, left him for another man in 1993, but apparently came back in 1997 or thereabouts (not sure I recall the years correctly) and they remarried.
So he's done a lot of very good things, I think. But even though he's governor of a state that neighbors Illinois, where I live, I'd never heard of him. And I also wonder if his proficiency on budgetary matters alone qualifies him to be President of the USA? I mean, it would be a huge, positive change from what we've got now, but the president does a whole lot more than manage the budget.
Same thing for Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, who I also like -- and I know rather more about Tim Pawlenty because he's been campaigning.
Just today, Donal Trump announced that he's decided not to run -- surprise, surprise. And over the weekend, Mike Huckabee stated that he's not in it, either.
And Gingrich was on the "Meet the Press," and knocked Paul Ryan's health care program as "social engineering from the right," which he dislikes as much social engineering from the left. I don't agree. However, Newt has been involved with a think tank called Health Solutions since before the 2008 elections, so I suppose he's got a competing health care plan. But he also supports the notions of compelling everyone to have insurance -- which is the very crux of the unconstitutionality of the Comrade's socialized medicine plan. Funny, too, Gingrich at one time seemed to advocate some kind of voucher system for Medicare, which is kind of the foundation of Ryan's plan, which Gingrich believes is too radical. So I don't quite understand what's going on there, and will have to get more information.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has decided not to apologize for Massachusetts' health care -- which has fostered a lot of fraud and abuse and made health care premiums in Massachusetts the highest in the USA -- saying that he believed it was the right thing to do for Massachusetts. But not at the federal level. Oh well....
Oh, and Ron Paul -- who once ran for President as a Libertarian and who has been a US Rep from Texas for decades -- also announced his availability as Republican candidate for president. I agree with Ron Paul on many, many things. But not his foreign policy. I know Libertarianism very, very well, and have a fundamental disagreement with the Libertarian notion that the US can just be "neutral" in foreign affairs, so that our foreign policy is basically trade agreements That works fine on paper. It's terrific theoretically. Until lunatics begin attacking the country PRECISELY because of our trade agreements -- because we trade with them at all, invading their ancient cultures with rock'n'roll, blue jeans, and iPads, so that the foundations of their ancient cultures begin to crumble and fall away. (I'd love to go into this, and probably will in another blog.)
Anyway, I'm beginning to recognize some key differences in what might be considered "old guard" Republicans and maybe "new wave," which includes many Tea Party and other plain young Turks. The Old Guard, which I'm afraid includes Gingrich, seems to be kind of more interested in going back to some vision of a kind of "normal" for the USA that includes a federal government of paternal benevolence. I'm afraid that old vision of normal -- that paternal benevolence -- has resulted in the complete mess we have right now in this country. That old normal just doesn't work.
And the fact that Mitch Daniels headed up a huge pharma -- all the pharmas are tightly regulated by the FDA, DEA, you name it -- and then OMB under George Bush are not big pluses in his favor to my way of thinking. I don't know... is it a good idea to elect a bureaucrat to eliminate bureaucrats? Still don't know enough about him.
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