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. Supporters of Jim Banks, the Indiana GOP congressman who formally declared his Senate candidacy this week, are hitting Daniels over it:
In addition, the Banks ally tells me, “Banks is pro-life and Daniels is pro-truce.” Daniels had called for a “truce” on social issues in 2010. When asked if, as president, he would reinstate the Reagan-era “Mexico City Policy,” which prohibits government funding of abortions abroad, Daniels told the Weekly Standard: “I don’t know.”
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:
“I would reinstate the Mexico City policy,” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told me, removing an uncertainty of his own creation. Promoting abortion with international family planning funds is one of “a thousand things we shouldn’t be spending money on.”
Yet days earlier, when asked if he would return to that family planning rule as president, Daniels had responded: “I don’t know.” It is a measure of Daniels’ standing as a possible Republican candidate in 2012 that his answer caused a considerable stir. Social conservatives criticized his idea that a “truce” on divisive, culture war controversies might be required to deal with “survival issues” such as terrorism and debt.
Daniels’ clarification on Mexico City shows his realism. But his continued insistence on the idea of a truce shows his stubbornness — a defining characteristic. “If there were a WMD attack, death would come to straights and gays, pro-life and pro-choice,” he told me. “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?”
Daniels’s idea of what a “truce” meant in practice was always somewhat hazy, but it continued to dog him in 2010 and 2011. Even Paul Ryan, who was publicly trying to recruit Daniels to run for president, said he disagreed with Daniels’s idea: “You’re not going to have a truce. Judges are going to come up. Issues come up, they’re unavoidable, and I’m never going to not vote pro-life.”
A lot has changed since 2010, but what Daniels has to say now about the “truce” would play a significant role in defining the 2024 Indiana GOP Senate primary — if he actually decides to throw his hat in the ring.