Doing It All Again

Forging ahead anyway.
Perhaps learning a strange lesson from the slim Democratic victory in the Indiana House and the inability of Democrats to knock off any of the vulnerable "Toll Road Republicans", Mitch Daniels is now proposing to do the same thing in the Republican strongholds in the suburban counties around Indianapolis. Come hell or high water, Daniels is going to press ahead with whatever he wants to do, and deal with the political consequences later.

This is either mightily bold, as Daniels' people like to portray it (here and here), or incredibly politically irrational. I have long predicted that popular things like full-day kindergarten would be the pivot around which Daniels could engineer a drive to and up the middle, and thus orchestrate his reelection as a popular governor.

One aspect of this agenda, the promise that the I-69 extension will be entirely toll-free, is certain to be popular. There is much to be said for the benefit of public works, whether built by the government or in some sort of public-private partnership as Daniels appears to want with this bypass idea. Even so, such an idea will be easy to villainize should the Democrats choose the same course as that they took with Major Moves.

Perhaps Mitch Daniels learned from the poor sales job he did with Major Moves. Republicans should hope so. Every election contains within it lessons for both parties. I do not think that the lesson for Hoosier Republicans of the 2006 election was that there should be more private toll roads. The lesson certainly wasn't that there shouldn't be private toll roads, or those Republicans up north would have been defeated in droves. But those are two very different things.

Maybe Daniels will marry his toll road idea to some of his initiatives--like on health insurance, kindergarten, veterans, and hiking the cigarette tax--more palatable to Democrats, and more desired by them as well. Compromise, after all, means that both sides get what they want.

Winston Churchill once said that there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Having dodged the bullet (or only been lightly grazed) this time, the governor seems eager to attempt the same thing again. Maybe he can pull it off.