Even if one does hold that fiscal issues are more important than cultural ones, that is not the same thing as calling for a ‘truce.’
John McCormack, citing a Corner post I wrote earlier today — which in turn, cited an interview he wrote back in 2010 — writes:
In 2010, as Mitch Daniels was considering a run for the presidency, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson wrote an excellent profile of the Indiana Republican governor. (Any aspiring political journalist ought to read it twice before attempting to write a profile.)
The newsiest nugget in the 2010 profile was Daniels’s comment proposing a “truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” while the government focused on the budget.
Daniels’s remark immediately sparked a backlash from social conservatives, and 13 years later the “truce” is again the subject of controversy as Daniels considers a 2024 run for Senate…It’s true that Daniels (right after he first proposed the “truce”) told me he didn’t know if he would reinstate the “Mexico City Policy,” which bars federal funding from going to organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas, during the first week of a Daniels administration. But ten days after his comment to me, Daniels told Michael Gerson he would reinstate the Mexico City Policy.
The retraction, notably, came after fierce social-conservative backlash to the original “truce” quote — a position that Daniels repeatedly doubled down on, even while reversing himself on Mexico City: “It wasn’t something I just blurted out,” he told Mark Hemingway a day after the original statement. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.” The Indiana governor, who at the time was mulling a presidential run, “repeatedly affirmed that this is a serious governing proposal, not an electoral strategy or a case where a politician tells people what he thinks they want to hear,” Hemingway noted.
That doesn’t make Daniels’s turnabout on taxpayer-funded abortions abroad unbelievable, at least on its face. As Ferguson’s original profile noted, “Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state. He serves as an elder at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, in inner-city Indianapolis, which he’s attended for 50 years.” Based on his long, reliably conservative policy record, there’s no reason to believe that Daniels wouldn’t take the right vote on an issue such as abortion if presented with the decision.
But if you read the “truce” comments in context, Daniels seems to be making a different point. His argument, fundamentally, was about priorities. In a follow-up interview about Daniels’s call for a truce, the governor told John that the nation faced a “genuine national emergency” regarding budgetary issues, and he argued that “maybe these [culture-war issues] could be set aside for a while. But this doesn’t mean anybody abandons their position at all. Everybody just stands down for a little while, while we try to save the republic.” A week later, in the interview retracting his Mexico City policy ambiguity — while reiterating his stance on the culture-war truce — Daniels said:
If the country goes broke, it would ruin the American dream for everyone. We are in this together. Whatever our honest disagreements on other questions, might we set them aside long enough to do some very difficult things without which we will be a different, lesser country?
The point wasn’t (and isn’t, as far as anyone can tell) that Daniels is socially liberal. That would be a spurious allegation. The point is that he didn’t think social issues were nearly as important as fiscal ones. The implication in the interview quoted above was that the culture-war debates of the day did not have the same stakes — conservative losses on those issues would not make America “a different, lesser country,” whereas conservatives losses on the budget would. Another section from Ferguson’s profile, quoting Curt Smith, the “head of the Indiana Family Institute, who’s known Daniels since the 1980s”:
In 2008, Smith supported an amendment to the state constitution to codify marriage between a man and a woman. He asked for the governor’s support.
“I wish he’d been more vocal about it, but that’s not his way,” Smith said. “What he told me, and told the public, was ‘As a citizen I will go into the voting booth and vote for it eagerly. As governor, I don’t have a role in this. The legislature and the people amend the constitution.’ ”
It’s been more than a decade since this controversy — if Daniels does throw his hat in the ring for the 2024 Senate race, it would be reasonable to keep an open mind about the possibility that his thinking may have changed. After all, the political and cultural situation in the country today is wildly different from how it was in 2010, and Americans of all stripes have undergone good-faith evolutions on these issues in light of the new context. But if Daniels has become more hawkish on culture-war issues, the burden of proof is on him to clarify his position for conservatives, particularly those of a social-conservative bent. Conservative frustration with his relatively laissez-faire attitude regarding the culture war in 2010 was merited, given the high stakes of the issues in question. As John wrote in the Weekly Standard at the time:
As Ramesh Ponnuru has observed, Ronald Reagan didn’t make social issues his top priority, “But he neither softened his positions on them nor declared a truce. He did what he could on those issues while concentrating on the reinvigoration of the country, the resumption of growth, and the defeat of the Soviets.”
Daniels leaves us wondering why he believes taking a different approach to social issues would help us get our fiscal house in order.
Even if one does hold that fiscal issues are more important than cultural ones — a position that I do not share — that is not the same thing as calling for a “truce.” Runaway government spending is a major problem for America. But a country that raises its children to hate their history, cannot distinguish between men and women, and actively discourages excellence in the name of “equity” will invariably struggle with issues such as budgetary bloat, too. We can and should do both. But we shouldn’t seek a truce on either.