In a repellent demonstration that many of today’s Republican Party differences are about personality and style, and not about policy or philosophy, the Club for Growth is choosing to run attack ads against former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, as he contemplates running for the U.S. Senate in 2024 to replace Mike Braun. (Braun will not run for another term, and intends to run for Indiana governor.)
Now, if Club for Growth prefers someone else besides the 73-year-old Daniels, a fresher face, that’s reasonable. But it’s another thing — and quite odd — for a self-described pro-growth, limited-government organization to preemptively rip into one of the most effective cost-cutting governors in recent history. “Mitch the Knife” is what Mark Hemingway’s cover story in NR called him in 2009. As Politico summarized in 2015, “Daniels inherited a broken, stubborn state in 2004 and transformed it into what he once called ‘the peony in a parking lot’ of Midwestern states—one with a $2 billion rainy day fund, an AAA credit rating and widespread recognition as having one of the best governors in the nation. In doing so, he left behind a veritable policy playbook for [John] Kasich and [Scott] Walker, among others.”
Even worse, the Club for Growth ad sneers, “After 50 years of big government, big pharma and big academia, Mitch Daniels forgot how to fight.”
That time in “big academia” refers to Daniels’s eleven years as president of Purdue University, where he blocked any tuition or fee increases, decreased room-and-board rates, stood up for free speech and diversity of thought, opposed vaccine mandates for staff and students, and basically taught the rest of the country how a conservative can run a university, keep costs low, and ensure that it provides an excellent education. Oh, and he also taught a course on World War I. Daniels’s record at Purdue may be the single best development in American higher education in the past decade.
I thought we wanted smart conservatives to go into academia and get runaway tuition under control, protect free speech and free thought, and prepare young people for a thriving career in a competitive world. Mitch Daniels went out and did exactly what conservatives say they want their leaders to do. Why is the Club for Growth contending Daniels’s work at Purdue is a bad thing?