First read
President Barack Obama should pick a mentor, a model, someone whose example he can follow, and he should do it quickly, before things get worse. Here is who: Mitch Daniels, the conservative, Republican governor of Indiana. What Obama has been getting wrong, he has been getting right. Obama can learn from him.
Take, for instance, three issues: jobs, health care and government debt.
Obama's approach on jobs was to persuade Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus bill in such a hurry that no one much knew what it contained. His promise was that it would hold unemployment down to 8 percent as the funds provided multiple work opportunities through "shovel-ready" projects.
What's happened since then is that much of the stimulus money is still sitting there, that 3.4 million jobs have been lost and that unemployment has climbed to almost 10 percent. The government did announce that federal grants and projects so far financed by the act had generated 30,000 jobs, but an investigation by the Associated Press shows that's incorrect, that the real figure is more like 25,000 because of misstatements by recipients turning in reports.
We don't know exactly what will happen with health care legislation yet, but the Democrats in both houses are presently figuring on a government option, which is to say, a new, runaway entitlement program that could cost many tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, maybe $1 trillion or more, while all kinds of new mandates are enforced on the public, on employers, insurance companies and health providers when many of the current problems could have been met by simple, practical, prudent steps over time.
And deficits? We're headed for a calamitous one this year, something on the order of $1.4 trillion, a trillion more than the year before as we endure a bout of public spending that could keep going for years, gobbling up a significant and dangerous percentage of the economy and threatening our future as few domestic issues ever have.
Now we get to Daniels. Himself a former executive of a big company, Daniels liked the idea of working with businesses after he was first elected in 2004, bringing a number of new, major firms to Indiana and persuading others to demonstrate their faith in Indiana's economic future by investing in growth and generating new jobs. The recession has undone some of that good work, but we could have had a stimulus that really stimulates if the reliance had been more on business tax breaks.
Daniels reformed health insurance in Indiana to the tune of extending coverage to 130,000 people who had not had it and helping still more people with drug purchases. He did hike cigarette taxes to help get there, but one tactic was health savings accounts that enable people to put aside their own money in tax-free accounts. In other words, don't just mandate. Liberate.
A truly extraordinary accomplishment was working out ways to actually make his state's government more efficient instead of just talking about it and thereby erasing a debt in the hundreds of millions and establishing a surplus over $1 billion. At the same time, Daniels led the way in reducing and capping property taxes even though the sales tax was later increased some.
Daniels' political philosophy may have been summed up in words he spoke to The Washington Times in a story reviewing his accomplishments: "Are we a nation of free individuals who take responsibility for our own actions, or should we just forfeit freedom and turn everything over to the federal government?"
Some think this man who worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush should run for president in 2012. He says he won't, and right now, I don't care nearly so much about that as I do about the Obama administration looking at ideas that work instead of ideas that get us deeper in trouble.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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