In the interest of disclosure, I encouraged Mike Pence to run for president in early 2010, for the 2012 nomination. House Majority Leader Dick Armey frequently told us that every senator woke up in the morning, looked in the mirror, and saw a potential president. The curse has spread to governors as well as far beyond. Give a good speech and you are suddenly the great new hope.
This debate is not new. A famous president of Purdue University once said that whoever raised the abortion debate was the loser. Political debate over issues such as gay marriage, abortion, marijuana, prayer in schools, hiring rights of religious organizations, and posting of the Ten Commandments has long been a part of the American political process.
It would be easy to miss the significance of the seven Indiana House Republicans all supporting the 2013 budget deal.
While I have been a bookaholic since elementary school, few books made as much of an impression on me as E.D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It was released in book form in 1987, rising to second on the New York Times Best Sellers List behind Allan Bloom’s less-readable but also influential and important “Closing of the American Mind.”
The only commonly accepted facts about the immigration debate in Washington and at every other political level in America are these:
At the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention, I learned firsthand of the intense ideological divisions within the conservative movement.
Early in the season in baseball, you can be leading the league in home runs because you can really hit a fastball, even if you can’t hit a curveball. But in the major leagues, soon all you will see is curveballs. You either adjust or you are gone.
Gov. Mike Pence doesn’t just want a tax cut for Hoosiers. A tax cut was foundational to his campaign and his philosophy of conservatism: Growth comes faster when individuals and corporations spend their own money, because it is more productive (leveraged better), more diversely spread (less likely to be bet on winners and losers), and more reflective of actual markets.
Liberals, at least those aligned with the Indiana teachers’ union, have been creatively interpreting the victory of Glenda Ritz as a rejection of innovative education and a call to return to the old systems of exclusive trust in the educational establishment.
If you are running for a statewide office in Indiana, what matters most: likability or substantive issues?
Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Gregg has hauled out the canard that Mike Pence is a “show horse,” not a “work horse,” based upon two “polls” in 2006 and 2008. Neither was scientific: They were anonymous, voting multiple times could be easily done, and rivals could rig the voting.
The trick that is easy to play on the average person is to imply that Washington is like your experience in most life situations in a business, church or even city or state government, which tends to be solution-oriented as opposed to establishing the ideological framework and laws for all private business and increasingly all governmental standards.
Among news people in Indiana there is an excited buzz: Mourdock may be in trouble in his Senate race against Donnelly. Indiana Democrats were swamped in the 2010 elections.
Steve Goldsmith was one of the brightest men to run for governor of Indiana but he lacked a populist touch.
