Writing an interesting profile is an art form, and RollCall’s Shira Toeplitz seems to be mastering it. Check out her latest profile of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
Here’s an excerpt:
[Daniels] was equally stingy in his personal life: He lived in a basement apartment on F Street Northeast between Second and Third streets — an undesirable neighborhood in the late 1970s — with worn-out furniture and bars on the doors and windows. He drove a beat-up, yellow Volkswagen Beetle with missing floorboards on the shotgun side.
…
As a Congressional staffer, Daniels frequently patronized the bars southeast of the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue, including the Tune Inn and Hawk ‘n Dove. He played on Lugar’s team in the Congressional softball league. He even became a Washington Redskins fan.
Daniels was also intensely loyal to his staff. One former colleague remembered calling him at 2 a.m. to ask him to come over to his place and help him exterminate a handful of rats who had eaten through the wall in his apartment. The duo trapped the rats, and while his colleague beat them with a racquetball racquet, Daniels stabbed the rodents with an ice pick. It worked.
Wasn’t Tom DeLay called “the Exterminator”? (This kind of makes me like him more …)