Matt Tully has a column on the National GOP’s recent interest in Gov. Daniels. Why the attention? He won last year, which makes him a rarity. Mostly, Tully’s comments are fairly accurate, but I think he’s overly generous on the subject of Daniel’s history of changing things in Indiana’s government. Tully notes that Daniels’ “reforms” came in his first term. It probably would have been more accurate to note that his big ticket changes came in Daniels’ first two years. Years 3, 4, and 5 have not seen him pass (or, really even push very hard for) anything big.
So far, Daniels’ two big changes, as far as I can tell, are Daylight Saving Time and selling off Indiana’s toll road. Daylight Saving Time doesn’t translate to anything nationally. It’s an Indiana-specific issue which takes on greater importance because of our proximity to a time line, our longitude, and our relatively narrow width. And, his leadership was enough to barely, barely get the bill passed by convincing a freshman Republican to renege on a promise to his constituents and sacrifice his political career. And even that required him to duck, weave and obfuscate on the subject of time zones which led to a god-awful county-by-county debate on time zones.
The jury is still out on the lease of the toll road that will expire when my 3 year old daughter is an old lady. It brought in significant chunks of money which is still being used on road projects. I haven’t noticed any great improvement in Indiana’s transportation infrastructure yet, but road construction takes awhile, so fairness suggests we should give that part of the equation some time. The privatization has resulted in higher tolls on the toll road. But, I won’t knock him for that, particularly, either. He lacked the political will or power to raise the tolls while keeping it under Indiana’s control. But, so did everybody that came before him. Those tolls should have been raised long ago, and used to pay off the bonds on the highway, after which the toll road should have been converted to a non-toll highway. Using tolls on northern Indiana motorists to pay for projects in the rest of the state has proven reasonably popular in the rest of the state for obvious reasons. What is not so clear is how the quality of the Toll Road is going to be going forward. Macquarie-Cintra’s incentive is to keep costs down and profits up. Some of that might come in the form of desirable innovations. But, probably its incentive is to keep the road in shape that is just barely good enough to prevent motorists from taking local roads instead. And then there is the wild-card of Macquarie-Cintra’s financial shape; a hazard of entrusting public infrastructure to private investors.
While Gov. Daniels doesn’t have the outright crazy factor that seems to be present in the likes of Sarah Palin, he has less noted characteristics like an outright hostility to environmental protections. He has gutted the enforcement powers of the Department of Natural Resources. His recent editorial on cap and trade legislation was blistering. Attempts to internalize the environmental costs of doing business such that they are reflected in the price of doing business are anathema to him.
I don’t begrudge Gov. Daniels his moment in the sun, but if he does, in fact, have national aspirations, hopefully this blog can provide something of a catalog of his tenure.
Well, Gov. Daniels has done some other things: cutting school budgets, increasing spending on prisons so he can build more (still looking for an extra $100 million), cutting $1 billion out of a budget that has grown to the largest state budget we’ve ever had (grown to that level under him), only to turn around and blame the Democrats for not giving him what he wants. Oh, and he’s selling off some institutions for at-risk youth to the national government, creating larger federal government in the name of smaller state government (isn’t that contrary to conservatism?). Sigh.
Doug — give the Gov a little credit on the time zone swap – even if you won’t let it go….at least Indiana has come near the 20th century now (as the rest of the modern world is in the 21st century)
Nah. Whatever the merits of Daylight Saving Time itself, Daniels absolutely screwed the pooch and went AWOL on the related time zone issue. He had to — if he had been honest about the time zones and attempted to deal with it up front, he never would have gotten DST passed, regardless of Troy “I’ll Never Vote For It” Woodruff’s willingness to commit political immolation.
Furthermore, I haven’t noticed that Indiana is in appreciably better condition due to Daniels screwing around with the clocks. Lastly, it was Tully who mentioned it as one of Daniels’ signature accomplishments.
Here’s the thing I’d like to have someone explain to me before your daughter is an old lady: how does obvious spin become the thieves’ cant of political punditatin’? Here’s Tully, explaining why The Bonzai Governor is a True Reformer:
He cleaned up the state budget, boosted roads funding by privatizing the Indiana Toll Road and put an aggressive economic development unit in place.
I’m not saying this is wrong, necessarily, though each claim, or its efficacy, or both, could be disputed, and it should be recognized that all of them are. And I’m not using “spin” as a synonym for “lie”; I have a great deal of respect for the matter of finding the correct perspective on things. But how does any of this add up to reform? Maybe the budget was balanced, or maybe we’re calling one accounting trick “trickery” and another “blade-like”; one thing’s certain, we haven’t reformed Indiana’s budget process. Maybe the Toll Road deal was savvy, but “selling one state-owned resource so the state can build new ones” is a reform how exactly? The man has behaved like someone with a well-worn subset of Republican ideas. It’s Indiana. It wasn’t exactly the Democratic People’s Socialist Republic of Wabashistan before Mitch showed up.