Questions Asked, and Answered

Frugal Hoosiers asks the question about 2012: "What should Sarah Palin do?"

I'm sure that their preferred answer has absolutely nothing to do with the poll present on their sidebar: "Should Mitch Daniels run for President?" They seem to have a decided opinion about the answer to that, and have been blogging it a lot lately.

Alas, Mitch Daniels will probably not be much of a candidate for President, should he even run. Superficially, he has a comb-over. More substantively, he'll have a hard time getting out of a Republican Primary after he raises business taxes by 150%.

Unlike some Republicans, I won't take Mitch Daniels at his word when he says he never intends to run for office again. Daniels is a savvy politician, and one of the most important things about running for office is that people have to want you to have the office more than you yourself want to have it.

Or at least it has to appear that way. You saw this in the Mitch operation in 2004, and I have no doubt that you'd see a similar astroturfing effort as a prelude to any Mitch for President campaign. Tell that to Mitt Romney in 2008, who wanted it far more than people wanted him. Then you have Fred Thompson at the far opposite extreme, whose supporters wanted him to have something that he apparently didn't want to have at all.

The Democrats, as a party, have developed a vicious policy of preemptively smearing any candidate that they view to be a threat in 2012. They have not ceased their attacks on Sarah Palin, and they wasted no time in tearing into Bobby Jindal when he gave the GOP response to Obama's first speech to Congress.

Now, part of those criticisms are deserved. Sarah Palin has given her opponents no shortage of ammunition. Bobby Jindal's delivery of that GOP response message was clearly lackluster. And there's a certain over-thinking involved in the assumption by some Republicans that, just because the Democrats attack a Republican that they fear a campaign by that Republican. Sometimes they attack just because they are given the opening. Other times, they deliberately dig in order to damage someone they view to be a genuine threat.

But I think it's safe to say that if Democrats genuinely believed that Mitch Daniels intended to run in 2012, or (just as importantly) they feared he would have a chance if he did, they would already be attacking him. We'd be seeing stories about the college drug arrest, about his time in the Bush administration, his background as a Syrian-American, or any number of other things where Democrats could conceivably make political hay.

There's a certain sinister and effective logic in the Democrats' program of preemptively smearing and kneecapping potential rising stars in the other party. Imagine, for a moment, what the 2008 election might have looked like had some of the more interesting aspects of Barack Obama's background (say, Jeremiah Wright or his ties to the Chicago machine) come out right after his much-touted convention speech in 2004.

The attack rottweilers of BC04 would have left virtually nothing left on Barack Obama's bones, and he certainly wouldn't have been considered by his own party to be a viable candidate for 2008. The Republican Party still has a lot to learn, in that respect.

But, at any rate, I suppose there's nothing wrong with dreaming and the folks at Frugal Hoosiers are welcome to keep on dreaming while they earn taxpayer dollars in their state government sinecures.