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.
