Restore Sanity: Draft Mitch Daniels

Indiana governor Mitch Daniels' fiscal credibility and serious tone make him the best hope for restoring civility and focus to Washington.

Is Mitch Daniels the Republican presidential candidate that my generation has been waiting for?

A group of friends at Yale and I believe so. And that’s why we’ve launched the Student Initiative to Draft Daniels for President in 2012 to introduce Indiana’s Republican governor to college students across America.

Although we’re friends, we disagree on many things politically. Some of us, like myself, voted enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, some others would never vote for a Democrat, and some look around at the slate of Fox-subsidized pretenders and see only candidates they would never vote for. Then we started talking about Mitch Daniels, and we agreed we liked his record and what he was saying.  So we decided we wanted to tell voting-age students why, trusting that with their help we could convince the governor to seek the Republican nomination in 2012.

Why do we think our generation can unite behind this “uncharismatic” Indiana governor? Because his candidacy will give us a new hope for solving two of the greatest issues my generation faces: the degradation of national political discourse and the drastic rise in the federal debt.

Every generation bemoans that the politics of their day is less civil than the last, but our age group holds a special claim. Polarization is measurably worse than ever in our politics, and partisan-driven cable news and talk radio bombard the average American with unfair and unbalanced perspectives.  Indeed, our initiative is in large part a reaction to the super-charged partisan rhetoric we’ve witnessed increase in volume over the past two years.

In 2008, like many first-time presidential voters, I was swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for “hope” and “change” and ran out with my friends to hold hands and sing songs when Barack Obama was elected president. But this past summer I became discontented. Was this the change I had voted for? What was the change I had voted for? Had he done too much of what I had wanted? Or too little?

How could I even figure that out? With so much white noise on 24/7 cable news and the blogosphere, I felt adrift and found Jon Stewart’s satirical political analysis to be my only guiding light: Democrats may seem incompetent, but Republicans seem crazy. How then in this environment can we restore sanity to our politics? When a satirical news show has more credibility than so-called “real” news shows what can we do?

What if there was a candidate both competent and sane who could take the Republican stage in 2012 and offer a real alternative to the Obama agenda? What if there was a Republican who would stand up and actually say what needs to be done -- for a change?

Then we could do more than just “rally to restore sanity”; we could push for having a national election that wouldn’t be another, as Stewart says, “Cluster*@## to the White House.” So we are a group of young adults telling our parents to "grow up." Can't we just have an adult conversation about the legacy you are leaving us?

“Adult Conversation” is a catchphrase today among many Republican politicians and pundits, but you hear very little new being said from most of them. Governor Daniels, however, has gone out on a political limb by suggesting that we must declare a “social truce” in order to fix the economy and tackle the debt. We are all welcome to our social opinions, but when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says that the national debt is the top threat to our national security it is time to declare a truce in the culture war and do what needs to be done to cut the budget down to size and get our economy producing jobs.

Here again, Governor Daniels sets himself apart from other 2012 Republican contenders. He earned the nickname “The Blade” for his ability to cut out excess spending as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as Indiana’s governor for turning a large deficit into consistent surpluses. While my generation has grown skeptical of Republican claims of practicing fiscal conservatism, there is no doubting Daniels’ record.

Between his remarkable fiscal credibility and his serious tone, he is what my generation has been waiting to see out of a Republican presidential nominee.  Party politics aside, above all else, we just want to feel as though we face a clear and serious choice. And we believe Daniels offers us that choice.

We hope, as unlikely as it might seem today, that the presidential election of 2012 will not more deeply entrench both sides within their prejudices, and alienate more Americans from each other, when we need to come together for the sake of our nation’s future. We hope the 2012 presidential campaign will start a sincere and adult conversation about the future of our country.

With Daniels representing the Republican half of our country’s great debate, we are confident that will happen.