Robert Novak’s column today was extremely irritating. Not because it was wrong or bad–it was a good column. It’s just that I was planning on writing on the same basic subject–tax-hiking Republican governors–for NR’s next issue, and it complicated my life.

But I think Novak’s column did influence the comments Indiana governor Mitch Daniels just made to me over the phone. The governor wants a one-year, one-point increase in the state’s top income-tax rate. Novak writes, “Daniels is contemptuous of criticism from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and The Wall Street Journal. ‘If I told you how little I care,’ he told me, ‘it would be hard to exaggerate.’”

Without referring explicitly to that comment, Daniels twice struck a very different note with me just now. “I’m not happy that my old friends are disappointed, I’m really not and I understand their point of view, but I’m just trying to solve a problem out here and live up to a duty,” he said, referring to the state’s constitutional requirement that the budget be balanced. At the end of our interview he said: “I’m no different person than I was before and I’m not comfortable when my friends are out of sorts. Over the course of 4 years, I think they’ll have reason to feel that Indiana has been in the hands that they thought it would be all along.”