As Daniels considers White House run, supporters venerate, critics unload

Daniels is not without his critics

But not everyone is quite so taken with the governor.

“He has a perception as being a really wonkish, deep thinker on these policy issues, but I think that’s extremely exaggerated,” said a former Daniels administration official. “He’s actually quite, quite political, politically minded. Certainly in my experience with developing policies, most of what I was involved in had more to do with appearances and politics and than any sort of deep rooted ideological or philosophical agenda.”

This criticism is echoed by some in Indiana who feel that Daniels has not accomplished enough to justify the acclaim. There is a perception that perhaps he avoided taking on certain arguments that he felt he would not be able to win, playing politics instead of sticking to principles.

He has also come under attack for one of his first acts as governor: proposing* to raise taxes on those making over $100,000 a year in the interest of balancing the budget. The move drew fire from many of the same people who had supported him in his campaign for the office. Daniels got results, however, turning Indiana’s deficit into a surplus by the end of his first term, and earning praise for streamlining the state government.

Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at Cato Institute who used to work in Daniels’ Office of Management and Budget, has questioned some of the claims made about the governor’s record.

In a profile of Daniels in The Weekly Standard, Kitchell recounted a story of how the governor’s office put pennies in the tires of government owned cars to see which ones never actually left the parking lot, as a way of eliminating unnecessary waste in government. But DeHaven says that though the governor gets credit for this, he was utterly unhelpful in the effort.

“That was an initiative undertaken by my dept in OMB and we couldn’t get any support from the governor’s office to do anything about all those state vehicles,” said DeHaven.

He also said that while Daniels gets credit for having reduced the size of the state government, much of that was just smoke and mirrors. He explained that many agencies have in their budget extra positions that no person actually fills. Those positions get funded, and “it gives the agencies flexibility.” The governor, DeHaven said, “finds out there are these thousands and thousands of budgeted positions…and says ‘get rid of them.’ The agencies of course don’t want to…They get rid of some of them. Next thing you know he’s talking about his reductions in the state workforce.”

DeHaven said he has requested data on that issue in his capacity as an economist at Cato and has received no response. “Until I see the data and the names,” he said, “he’s misrepresenting his position on that.”

Others have criticized Daniels’ management style and the way he runs his administration.

“He’s very ego driven,” the former Daniels administration official said. “He struck me as incredibly insecure; extremely competitive. He was always wanting to be filled in on what other governors and states were doing.”

“He doesn’t like to be questioned on his policies or asked to explain in detail,” the former official continued. “He definitely doesn’t like to be challenged and he does get defensive.”

As a result, the former official said, “policy staffers were often afraid to tell him what exactly what was going on. We were often instructed not to give him bad news.” For instance, if “somebody says something bad about him in the press, or if there was going to be a show on the 11 o’clock news that found something bad in the state government, you know, they didn’t want him to know. The ideal is to tell him things are fine and dandy.”

For the most part, the former administration official said, the people who work for Daniels complied with this.

The “biggest disappointment was the people that Daniels surrounded himself with,” the former official said. “I don’t know if that’s ‘cause they were loyalists or people he could intellectually dominate from an intimidation standpoint, but I think that was disappointing.

“I would point to a weakness in his management style: putting too much faith in some of his lieutenants.”

“There’s definitely a loyalist mentality among staff,” the former administration official continued. “So yeah, if you start to stray from the reservation, your time might be short. Or else you could start to get black listed, kept out of things. And they just don’t go and get rid of you because of concerns about you going to the press and saying bad stuff.”

Indeed, Daniels has gotten very little bad press of late; in fact, the Republican establishment seems to think quite favorably of a Daniels run. Conservative intellectual George Will has praised Daniels in his columns, and David Brooks penned a column entitled “Run, Mitch, Run.” The new National Journal insiders poll ranks Daniels as the presidential candidate whose stock has risen the most over the last several months.

* Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Gov. Daniels raised taxes on those making over $100,000 a year. In fact, he only proposed to raise taxes, but the legislature did not pass the proposal.