His time as governor and as Purdue president, as well as his character, show he’s what we need more of in politics.
Last week, Jim Geraghty took note of a curious anti-endorsement run by the fiscally conservative, free-market Club for Growth against Mitch Daniels. The former Indiana governor is currently contemplating a run for the Senate seat that will be vacated by Mike Braun, the incumbent Republican who is running for governor in 2024. It would be one thing, Jim admitted, if the Club simply wanted a fresh face. However,
it’s another thing — and quite odd — for a self-described pro-growth, limited-government organization to preemptively rip into one of the most effective cost-cutting governors in recent history. “Mitch the Knife” is what Mark Hemingway’s cover story in NR called him in 2009. As Politico summarized in 2015, “Daniels inherited a broken, stubborn state in 2004 and transformed it into what he once called ‘the peony in a parking lot’ of Midwestern states—one with a $2 billion rainy day fund, an AAA credit rating and widespread recognition as having one of the best governors in the nation. In doing so, he left behind a veritable policy playbook for [John] Kasich and [Scott] Walker, among others.”
The ad bemoans that “after 50 years of big government, big pharma and big academia, Mitch Daniels forgot how to fight.” But, as Jim also notes, this last complaint about “big academia” is strange as well. Daniels spent the last decade ostensibly out of politics, as president of Purdue University, a public research institution admired in the state (except perhaps by Indiana University fans during basketball games). And he was no mere placeholder there:
He blocked any tuition or fee increases, decreased room-and-board rates, stood up for free speech and diversity of thought, opposed vaccine mandates for staff and students, and basically taught the rest of the country how a conservative can run a university, keep costs low, and ensure that it provides an excellent education.
To Daniels’s Covid record, one could add his general insistence on keeping students’ experiences as normal as possible. As Charles Hilu wrote about an interview he had with Daniels last year:
While other schools moved entirely or predominantly online, Daniels made the 2020–21 school year much more normal than his counterparts did, keeping students in class throughout the year with masks and social distancing.
“We didn’t mandate,” Daniels said. “We didn’t lock down. But on a voluntary basis, our whole community, most notably the students, stepped up to their responsibility to practice careful health habits themselves and to encourage others to do so.”
And to his overall record, one would be remiss not to mention Daniels’s sterling defense of freedom of speech as Purdue president. As Hilu noted, Daniels made Purdue a beacon of free expression in a higher-education system increasingly turning away from such principles:
When he took office, the school had the lowest rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In FIRE’s most recent rankings, Purdue sits at sixth in the country, and the highest in the Big Ten.
The most important step he took toward that accomplishment was adopting the “Chicago Principles.” In 2014, University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer commissioned a Committee on Freedom of Expression to outline the school’s commitment to First Amendment principles.
The next year, the committee returned the Chicago Principles, which declared that “the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” Its report also prohibited students from disrupting unpopular speakers. Daniels took note of the report and immediately adopted the principles for Purdue.
Daniels also viewed his institution as a means to address pressing cultural issues, such as the declining social status of men. In his 2022 open letter to Purdue, Daniels observed that, in 2021, the mainstream finally began to realize that women outnumbered men in college enrollments, a problem that had been worsening for decades. In response, Daniels stated that Purdue is still a relatively male-heavy school on account of the prominence of STEM subjects among its students (“I have sometimes observed that no one ever writes to express concern that we need more men in our 87% female veterinary medicine college, or our 89% female nursing department, or our 64% female college of pharmacy,” he cheekily noted). And though the school “cannot solve this looming national problem” of fewer male college graduates, its “sending out thousands of exceptional young engineers, computer scientists, and other technology experts who happen to be men is a contribution few other institutions are making.” (A pointless controversy ensued as a result of Daniels’s plain truth-telling.)
Another hot-button issue on which Daniels demonstrated concrete action was standing up to the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP has a well-established record of attempting to subvert American institutions of higher education. In December 2021, Chinese Purdue student Zhihao Kong criticized the totalitarian excesses of his country’s government. This caused some other Chinese students at Purdue to threaten him, and, even worse, led the Chinese government to begin harassing his family still living in the country (thereby vindicating his original criticisms). Daniels was having none of it. In a message he delivered to the student body, he said that “any such intimidation is unacceptable and unwelcome on our campus. Purdue has punished less personal, direct and threatening conduct” and indeed promised to punish guilty students if they could be found. He added:
Joining the Purdue community requires acceptance of its rules and values, and no value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression. Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.
When the long arm of the CCP tried to reach into an American institution, a Daniels-led Purdue did the opposite of what so many other entities have done and stood athwart. In a more-prosaic but also vital way, Daniels linked the work that Purdue, an esteemed research university, was doing to the national-security challenges this country faces, especially from China. “We also embrace, as not all universities frankly do, a duty to assist the national security in any way we can in areas like hypersonics, energetics, and now, what we believe is a – very genuinely a national security imperative: to have self-sufficiency and leadership in semiconductors,” Daniel said last year. “We hope to play a role.” Daniels’s thinking here is consonant with last year’s National Conservatism Statement of Principles, which stated that “education policy should serve manifest national needs” and called for a “prudent economic policy that would “mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.”
Longtime Daniels-watchers would find none of this surprising. He has long warned of the threat that China poses to the United States. In “The Red Menace,” a chapter of his 2011 book Keeping the Republic, Daniels presciently wrote that China “has already shown on multiple fronts that American views are of no particular interest to it.” Also in that book, he envisioned a nightmare scenario in which China decides to stop lending to the U.S., cratering its economy, and invading Taiwan in the ensuing chaos. Twelve years ago, in a much-better fiscal situation for the U.S., Daniels was already sounding the alarm about U.S. dependence on China. “We are now borrowing the entire defense budget (we’ve been spending about $700 billion a year on defense while running a deficit of about $1.4 trillion), much of it from the very countries, most notably China, against whom our forces might one day have to be deployed.”
Free speech, Covid-19, the problems facing young males, the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party — all are issues on which Daniels took a strong stance as president of Purdue. This despite the fact that, as he told Charles Hilu, he had “taken a vow of political celibacy” during his time as president out of respect for the public university that he led. That he maintained such a level of modesty makes him an outlier; as Yuval Levin has noted, it is far more common these days for institutional actors to engage in “performative” behavior. But some issues are unavoidable, and some decisions have to be made. Daniels had no trouble making them. His time in what Club for Growth dismisses as “Big Academia” is not only a valid means to understand his character as a leader, but also proof of that character’s soundness, and of Daniels’s thoughtful and principled conservatism.
So why all the anti-Daniels hatred? Aside from the Club for Growth, there is Donald Trump Jr., who called him a “weak RINO” for criticizing some of Donald Trump’s behavior, and various others who liken him to failed candidates from the past unable to adapt to modern circumstances – “an old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days,” as the Club for Growth put it. Leave aside that Daniels was a tremendously successful and popular governor, and that he has hardly been frozen in amber since leaving that job. What he has done, throughout his tenure in public life, is to carve out a political identity separate from Trump. That is anathema to what Levin calls the “Trump faction” in the Republican Party, a faction (not a majority) that has every incentive to drive out politicians whose primary criterion for politics is fealty to Trump himself — even as the record of that criterion is dubious, at best.
Based on past behavior, it is possible that Mitch Daniels might respond to a shadowboxing campaign against him by deciding not to reenter politics. Although perhaps not: David Drucker of the Washington Examiner reports that the very attempts to misrepresent his record may help to convince Daniels to enter the fray. Regardless, in the profiles of him as he mulled a 2012 presidential run, and in the one time I met him in person (full disclosure) as he made his end-of-governorship motorcycle tour of Indiana, Daniels evinced a fundamental modesty and aversion to the spotlight. These were characteristics that made him rare then and that are almost unheard-of now. If there is any sense in which Daniels is a throwback, it is that. But maybe we could use more of that kind of throwback in our politics.