Rob Port at Say Anything on Mitch Daniels’ soft-footing social issues:

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is pro-life and a Christian but wants focus on fiscal rather than social issues given the state of the nation’s economy and budget.

Does this kill off his hopes for a candidacy in 2012?

Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “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,”

I think that’s the big lesson of the Tea Party so far, not to mention of the Reagan administration:  if you don’t conquer government’s addictions to spending and taxes, then we’re screwed on the social issues anyway – and as luck’d have it, most candidates that are conservative on spending and taxes are on the right side of the social issues anyway.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 8:12 am and is filed under Campaign '12, Culture War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.