The question on the Right for a distressingly long time has been: “Who is the new Reagan?”
It is the wrong question.
There will never be another Reagan. Just as there will never be another Washington or another Lincoln.
Our next great leader will be great not because he or she emulates the greatness of another but because a unique greatness is found within that person.
Reagan was not the “new” Taft or the “new” Goldwater. He was Reagan.
And that was more than enough.
Yet, this question leads us to different styles of leadership or personality. Reagan was one style; Taft another; Goldwater still another.
And Calvin Coolidge was another.
Silent Cal Coolidge, even in his own era, possessed an odd manner: a painful taciturnity balanced with the driest of New England wit, a record of fiscal and economic accomplishment at both the federal and state levels—and, putting it diplomatically, a well-honed personal sense of economy as well. Certainly, Cal lacked the charm of a Reagan or the glamour of a Palin, but he got the job done.
So does Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
And with much the same flinty style.
“I've known Daniels since he was a staffer for Sen. Richard Lugar in the 1980s,” observed political analyst Michael Barone in October 2010, “and for years he struck me as one of the least likely candidates for public office. He's got strong, mostly conservative convictions; he doesn't suffer fools (and elected politicians) gladly; he doesn't care if others don't like him.”
In an age of red ink, the former Reagan political aide and George W. Bush Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Daniels has not only delivered balanced budgets, he has miraculously delivered a billion-dollar surplus. He has privatized roads and instituted a property tax cap. An associate has termed him “viscerally parsimonious.” No glad-hander, in 2004, he, nonetheless, became the first Hoosier since 1894 to defeat an incumbent governor—and did it handily. Four years later, as voters gleefully pitched Republicans overboard nationwide, Daniels galloped to re-election by 18 percentage points.
For his part, the equally-unlikely politician Coolidge won more elective offices than any other president and slashed top marginal tax rates from 50 percent to 25 percent (they had risen to 77 percent under Woodrow Wilson), cut taxes four times and produced a budget surplus each year of his presidency.
At February 2011’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Mitch Daniels—who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Coolidge—eerily channeled Silent Cal’s rhetoric. While Coolidge had told Americans, “the chief business of the American people is business, Daniels informed CPAC attendees: “When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: ‘Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of “corporate citizenship.” If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.’”
Coolidge once snapped that “Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery, and that he wanted “the people of America to be able to work less for the Government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom.”
Said Daniels at CPAC: “We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.”
And Daniels added for good measure, “The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: “Prove to me why we should.”
There were even odd little Coolidge flourishes in Daniels’ speech, hardly to be noticed save by the hard-core Coolidge aficionado. When Daniels warned of a new “Red Menace” of deficit “red ink,” he concluded, “We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.” Four times he employed the word “arithmetic.” In this odd mathematical obsession, he seemed to echo Coolidge’s famous advice: “Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.”
At CPAC, Daniels successfully emulated Coolidge’s renowned dry wit. It, however, must also be admitted that he also exhibited yet another Silent Cal attribute. When Coolidge served as Massachusetts lieutenant governor, it was said that his boss, Governor Samuel W. McCall could fill any hall in the state—and Coolidge could empty it.
The Washington Post noted that Daniels’ CPAC speech “was received politely in the hall.” But “politely” may be too gentle a word. Conditioned by two days of red-hot oratory, several attendees spontaneously later complained to me that Daniels’ delivery was as flat and arid as the Midwestern plains.
Yet, when one
read Daniel’s CPAC address—or better yet
thought about it—the more one marveled at its plainspoken wisdom and, above all, the sheer maturity of it. As the Washington Post (not always a true barometer for measuring conservative opinion, but in this case rather on target), further admitted that Daniels’ CPAC comments were “met with effusive praise by the party's smart set, the national media and, interestingly, the Drudge Report.”
Daniels’ CPAC remarks concluded, he stepped down from dais. I greeted him with the words: “You know you
do look like Coolidge.”
The observation clearly startled him.
Even the diminutive, reddish-gray-haired but decidedly balding, Daniels did not easily relish a physical comparison to an individual once famously referred to as a sullen little red-headed man.
But he recovered to respond, “I hope I
think like him.”
I hope so too.
