From Politico, one possible problem for Mitch Daniels if he seeks the GOP presidential nomination:
A tough, Arizona-style anti-immigration bill in the Indiana state Legislature has put Gov. Mitch Daniels — who is mum on whether he backs it — on a collision course with tea party activists who see it as a big priority and could have national implications for the Indiana governor in a GOP presidential primary.
Daniels, who's mulling a White House run in 2012 and won rave reviews for his CPAC speech last weekend, has yet to take a stand on legislation introduced by State Sen. Mike Delph that died under Democratic-controlled Legislatures in each of the last several years — but faces greatly improved odds of passing this time around.
[. . .]
Murphy noted that the governor's office conducted a cost impact study on the bill and fixed it with a roughly $5 million price tag for enforcement — something he said he sees as an indication that Daniels' team is leaning against it. He also noted the governor has historically had strong relations with the growing Hispanic population, adding, "He speaks Spanish as a second language."
Daniels, while being conservative, has also bucked some of the GOP orthodoxy, such as calling last year for a "truce" on culture wars to deal with the budget perils facing the country.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-partisan group, said If Daniels has any designs on higher office, he'll tread carefully.
“That could include sitting on it and deliberating it but it probably would not mean coming out openly against it," Krikorian said.
Daniels just wants to be the fiscal guy, but he keeps running into opposition. When Democrats controlled the House, Speaker Pat Bauer kept a lot of the GOP's pet projects from being even heard, so Republicans are making the most of their majority while they have it. A lot of bills with social-conservative origins are going to land on Daniels' desk, and he's going to be judged on what he does with them, whether he likes it or not.
And fron National Review Online:
A lot of Republicans running in 2012 are going to face problems with the Tea Party on immigration. The Tea Party groups didn't address immigration (except maybe those in Arizona), just as they avoided all issues other than spending and size of government, and that was a smart move at the time. But as an outpouring of populist nationalism, they are almost coterminous with immigration hawks, and woe to any open-borders Republican seeking their help. This is why Dick Armey and Grover Norquist, both strong open-borders guys, don't even utter the word “immigration” to Tea Party folks, lest they have tomatoes thrown at them.
In Daniels' speeches in the last year or so, there has been a strong dose of federalist sentiment -- by doing things it shouldn't, Wasington puts enormous strain on the states' ability to do what they should be doing. But there's a flip side to that: The federal government also limits the states when it fails to do things it should do. Immigration is one of those things (and it's no special knock of President Obama -- the failure goes back several administrations). The more states there are that try to pick up the slack, the more pressure it puts on the federal government to start dealing with the issue.
