Values Voters Not Jumping on the Daniels Bandwagon

Mitch Daniels is often talked about as a potential 2012 or 2016 presidential candidate. But can he win over social conservatives with his mainstream views?

When conservatives talk about potential presidential candidates for 2012 (and even 2016) who are not insane culture warriors or political demagogues, one name invariably comes up: Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana. He has balanced the state’s budget, has a reputation for efficiency, and won reelection in the same year that his state gave its electoral votes to Obama. As the former head of the OMB, his policy and wonk credentials are undisputed. And if there is one lesson from the Values Voter Summit, it’s that he will never be able to be president.

In an interview with the Weekly Standard in June, Daniels said the the right “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while.” He received backlash for that comment when it was published, and it made a return at the Values Voter Summit.

Phyllis Schlafly, a famous Reagan-era anti-feminist and social conservative, opened up her speech by calling out Daniel’s remarks as wrong (though she did not call him out by name.) She asserted that despite the focus on economic issues from the Tea Party, the conservative movement has to make room for social conservatives like her. She got a fair bit of applause for that remark.

Curiously Schlafly does care about economic policy. She used her speech to decry the decline of the middle class, and how middle class jobs have been lost due to "bad trade policies." As far as she was concerned though, this was all due only to the decline of marriage and broken families. (It should be noted that good scholarly work has been done on the topic of how family stability helps economic stability, but clearly it is more than just the decline the marriage that has led to a loss of jobs to China.)

Conservative policy wonks sometimes lament that Mitch Daniels can’t win the presidential nomination because he is short and not charismatic. The real problem is that a large portion of the Republican base simply refuses to support a candidate who dares to take a position close to the mainstream of the country on social issues.

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