Social Security Sniping Must Stop

By Jonathan Martin

Mitch Daniels: Candidates shouldn't talk about Social Security without a real solution.

Daniels has a message for Rick Perry and Mitt Romney: cut the Social Security sniping.

The Indiana governor wants whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination to go big and bold with ideas, confronting what he believes is the existential fiscal crisis facing the country. And Daniels says the back-and-forth between the GOP frontrunners on Social Security doesn’t augur well for such a campaign.

“We should not scare people when there’s no reason to,” Daniels said when asked in an interview about Romney’s hard-hitting attacks on Perry over the Texas governor’s critique of the entitlement.

But the Hoosier had a warning for Perry, too.

“I think it’s also fair to say, ‘Don’t stop at diagnosing the [Social Security] problem unless you’re prepared to say a few things about how we save the safety net,” added Daniels.

He says of the spat: “I don’t think it’s a good moment for our party.”

Daniels isn’t running for president, but as his assessment of the Social Security debate suggests he also isn’t ready to recede into a quiet retirement at the end of his term next year. For one thing, the Republicans who are in the race won’t let him: They are beating a steady path to Indianapolis and saying all manner of nice things about the governor.

Mitt Romney was the latest to make the Indy pilgrimage just last week and he was right on cue when asked about where Daniels would fit in a Romney administration.

“Wherever he’d like to be,” said Romney. “Mitch is an extraordinarily capable guy.”

Daniels has also drawn notice for his own warm words.

Appearing last week with Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey, the Hoosier said of Christie’s presidential denials: “I’m not taking ‘no’ from Christie; I’m taking ‘not yet.’”

Daniels insisted to POLITICO that he’s not “out recruiting anybody,” but he also points to Perry’s August entry as a sign that it may not be too late for another candidate into the GOP field.

Some Daniels enthusiasts are eying him for vice-president, but the ever-modest Indiana governor, while not ruling out the prospect, doubts he’ll be asked.

“I don’t ever expect to bother them about it,” he says, when asked if his family would be up for his being on the GOP ticket next year.

It was the resistance of his wife and daughter that prompted him to forgo a presidential run, but some Republicans saw the joint interview Daniels and his publicity-shy wife, Cheri, did on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” as a signal that the family may be up for the Naval Observatory if not the White House.

By addressing their divorce and reconciliation in the interview, the thinking went, the Daniels’ could point to the sit-down next year as a sign of having sufficiently addressed the matter.

The Hoosier governor wearily dismisses the notion as Beltway over-analysis.

“It’s a signal that I wrote a book,” Daniels says of the joint interview, noting that CBS requested Cheri join him for the appearance.

Indeed, the uber-wonk has written a policy tome that he boasts is “obviously not a book written by a candidate.”

A glance at the politician-in-action pictorial montage in the middle of “Keeping the Republic: Saving America by Trusting Americans” and the effusive “Praise for Mitch Daniels” quotes on the back of the jacket may suggest otherwise. But the book’s vigorous denunciations of the sort of negative politics any national candidate would inevitably have to engage in reinforces his case.

While Daniels’ fear-the-new-red-menace warnings in the book about the looming fiscal crisis have drawn much of the early attention, what’s equally remarkable is the flamethrower he takes to the consultant class.

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