Here's a Fun Article About My Governor Who Should Never Be President

Budget Hawk Eyes Deficit.

David Leonhardt makes The Blade sound almost scarily reasonable, by omitting all of his catastrophic failures. It's all well and good to hear a Republican talk about investing in infrastructure, but letting Daniels wax patriotic about building roads without mentioning his penchant for privatizing them is just irresponsible journalism.

Frankly, a profile of Daniels that doesn't even contain the word "privatize" is dishonest. It is his defining characteristic as governor.

And despite the glowing whitewash that surrounds it, this is really the only passage that accurately reflects his governorship:

Shortly before taking office, he gathered his staff in an Indianapolis hotel and told them that their No. 1 goal was lifting the per capita disposable income of the state's residents. Instead, income growth in Indiana has trailed growth nationwide and in every bordering state but Michigan.

That paragraph arrives third from last in the entire piece.

Which is reflective of the national coverage of Daniels: He's frequently lauded as a great Republican governor with grand ideas, without much emphasis on the reality that his grand ideas don't work.

He's used Indiana as his testing ground and met failure, yet, inexplicably, the national media seems keen to help give him a chance to try again with the whole country.

So they're giving him the John McCain treatment: Rewriting him as a maverick who isn't constrained by party ideology, even though he's a textbook conservative who deviates from dogma cravenly, only when it's politically expedient. And, like McCain, he's no patriot; he's just a corporatist who fervently believes that the private sector holds all the answers, despite all evidence to the contrary.