City University of New York professor emeritus and Hudson Institute adjunct fellow Ron Radosh was very impressed with Mitch Daniels' GOP response to the State of the Union message last night:
Mitch Daniels excels in making conservative principles and ideas coherent and understandable to everyday Americans. He does not come off as condescending or hectoring, but rather, as a man who wants a good and strong America, and who realizes that the decades of crony capitalism and stale reactionary liberalism have had their day.
[. . .]
Yes, Daniels is not running, and for personal reasons, he decided long ago not to enter the race. I understand that there are family considerations. But if this election is so critical for our future as conservatives argue, a candidate with a chance to defeat Obama should put country ahead of family. Daniels is a man who has both private sector and government experience, is popular with Democrats and independents, and has won elections from the votes of both these groups in Indiana.
I think Radosh and a lot of other Republicans (see this Draft Mitch Daniels website) are looking at the way Newt and Mitt are splitting the vote and also contemplating the considerable political weaknesseses of both candidates and envisioning a brokered convention at which Daniels or someone else can be plucked out of reluctance to run. And since Repbulicans are dipping their toes in proportional delegate allocations (Florida will be the first winner-take-all state), this damn thing could go until June, and they could be right.
It's an interesting question, isn't it, whether a candidate should "put his country above his family" or whether his party even has the right to ask him to do it? Well, why not? There was a time when the government could force thousands of Americans to put their country above their families. Surely you remember something called the military draft -- it was in all the papers.
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Sarah Palin is also not running but I do not see her name mentioned. This all sounds like a rehash and reestablishment of the Bush influence upon the Republican establishment. With new candidates blocked in many of the voting states remaining, only the 17 caucus states are for sure entry primaries and the votes available wouldn't do much good without a brokered convention. Mitch doesn't have name recognituion outside the midwest so to paraphrase the song -- Short People Got No Reason to Run!
That's a favorite song of mine. Daniels may not wear platform shoes on his nasty little feet, but he does obviously wear those elevator shoes you see advertised in the back of The New Yorker. He lists his height as 5-foot-7, but like most sub-6-foot men, he's lying.
He would look preposterous standing on stage next to the (honestly) 6-foot-1 Obama and his full head of hair. Those things shouldn't matter, but history shows they do.