Indiana
Governor Mitch Daniels February 11, 2011 Remarks, Ronald Reagan Centennial Dinner, Conservative Political Action Conference, Washington, D.C.
Phyllis
Schlafly, David Keene, George Will, good friends, thank you for the enormous
privilege of this podium. Even a casual observer of American public life knows
how many great ideas have been born here, how many important debates joined
here, how many giants of our democracy appeared on this platform.
When David broached the invitation, my first reaction was one I often have: “Who cancelled?” But first choice or fifteenth, the honor, and the responsibility to do the occasion justice, is the same. I am seized with the sentiment best expressed by Hizzoner, the original Mayor Richard Daley, who once proclaimed a similar honor the “pinochle of success.”
When David broached the invitation, my first reaction was one I often have: “Who cancelled?” But first choice or fifteenth, the honor, and the responsibility to do the occasion justice, is the same. I am seized with the sentiment best expressed by Hizzoner, the original Mayor Richard Daley, who once proclaimed a similar honor the “pinochle of success.”
We are all
grateful to our co-sponsors, the Reagan Foundation and the Reagan Ranch. How
fitting that we convene under their auspices, as we close this first week of
the centennial. Those of us who served President Reagan were taught to show
constant respect for the presidency and whoever occupies it. But, among us
alums, the term “the President” tends to connote just one of those forty-four
men, that great man with whom God blessed America one hundred years ago this
week.
The prefix
in “co-sponsor” is meaningful tonight. It is no state secret that the two
foundations have not always been co-operative, or co-llaborative, or
co-llegial. So it is a tribute to the stature and diplomacy of David Keene that
they have come together to produce so warm a moment as this. I am now converted
to the view that yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved. Well
done, David; Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded for far less.
I bring
greetings from a place called Indiana. The coastal types present may think of
it as a “flyover” state, or one of those “I” states. Perhaps a quick
anthropological summary would help.
We Hoosiers
hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we “cling” to them, though not out
of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in
the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than
raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we
take in.
We believe
it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary
public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that
dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a
profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else
we should never have taken it at all.
Before our
General Assembly now is my proposal for an automatic refund of tax dollars
beyond a specified level of state reserves. We say that anytime budgets are balanced
and an ample savings account has been set aside, government should just stop
collecting taxes. Better to leave that money in the pockets of those who earned
it, than to let it burn a hole, as it always does, in the pockets of
government.
We believe that
government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.
We see government’s mission as fostering and enabling the important realms –
our businesses, service clubs, Little Leagues, churches – to flourish. Our
first thought is always for those on life’s first rung, and how we might
increase their chances of climbing.
Every day,
we work to lower the costs and barriers to free men and women creating wealth
for each other. We build roads, and bridges, and new sources of homegrown energy
at record rates, in order to have the strongest possible backbone to which
people of enterprise can attach their investments and build their dreams. When
business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: “Make
money. Go make money. That’s the first act of ‘corporate citizenship.’ If you
do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to
help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.”
We place our
trust in average people. We are confident in their ability to decide wisely for
themselves, on the important matters of their lives. So when we cut property
taxes, to the lowest level in America, we left flexibility for localities to
raise them, but only by securing the permission of their taxpayers, voting in
referendum. We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we
created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens
of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making
smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.
We have
broadened the right of parents to select the best place for their children’s
education to include every public school, traditional or charter, regardless of
geography, tuition-free. And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend
to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and
middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right
one for your child, you’re as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here’s
a voucher, go sign up.
Lastly,
speaking now for my administration colleagues, we believe in government that is
limited but active. Within that narrow sphere of legitimate collective action,
we choose to be the initiators of new ideas or, as we have labeled ourselves,
the Party of Purpose. In President Reagan’s phrase, “We are the change.” On
election nights, we remind each other that victory is not a vindication, it is
an instruction, not an endorsement, but an assignment.
The national
elections of 2010 carried an instruction. In our nation, in our time, the
friends of freedom have an assignment, as great as those of the 1860s, or the
1940s, or the long twilight of the Cold War. As in those days, the American
project is menaced by a survival-level threat. We face an enemy, lethal to
liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before. We
cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot
negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White.
I refer, of
course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of
indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can
debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds,
but the reality is pure arithmetic. No enterprise, small or large, public or
private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to
others as we are about to be.
Need I
illustrate? Surely the consequences, to prosperity, world influence, and
personal freedom itself are as clear to this audience as to any one could
appear before.
Do I
exaggerate? I’d love to be shown that I do. Any who think so please see me in
the hallway afterward, and bring your third grade math books.
If a foreign
power advanced an army to the border of our land, everyone in this room would
drop everything and look for a way to help. We would set aside all other
agendas and disputes as secondary, and go to the ramparts until the threat was
repelled. That is what those of us here, and every possible ally we can
persuade to join us, are now called to do. It is our generational assignment.
It is the mission of our era. Forgive the pun when I call it our “raison debt.”
Every
conflict has its draft dodgers. There are those who will not enlist with us.
Some who can accept, or even welcome, the ballooning of the state, regardless
of the cost in dollars, opportunity, or liberty, and the slippage of the United
States into a gray parity with the other nations of this earth. Some who
sincerely believe that history has devised a leftward ratchet, moving in fits
and starts but always in the direction of a more powerful state. The people who
coined the smug and infuriating term – have you heard it? – “the Reagan
Interruption.”
The task of
such people is now a simple one. They need only play good defense. The federal
spending commitments now in place will bring about the leviathan state they
have always sought. The health care travesty now on the books will engulf
private markets and produce a single-payer system or its equivalent, and it
won’t take long to happen. Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world
leadership will, in their eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one,
delivering the multilateral world of which they’ve dreamed so long.
Fortunately,
these folks remain few. They are vastly outnumbered by Americans who sense the
presence of the enemy, but are awaiting the call for volunteers, and a credible
battle plan for saving our Republic. That call must come from this room, and
rooms like it.
But we, too,
are relatively few in number, in a nation of 300 million. If freedom’s best
friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental
change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow
citizens, big change will not come. Or rather, big change will come, of the
kind that the skeptics of all centuries have predicted for those naïve
societies that believed that government of and by the people could long endure.
We know what
the basic elements must be. An affectionate thank you to the major social
welfare programs of the last century, but their sunsetting when those currently
or soon to be enrolled have passed off the scene. The creation of new Social
Security and Medicare compacts with the young people who will pay for their
elders and who deserve to have a backstop available to them in their own
retirement.
These
programs should reserve their funds for those most in need of them. They should
be updated to catch up to Americans’ increasing longevity and good health. They
should protect benefits against inflation but not overprotect them. Medicare
2.0 should restore to the next generation the dignity of making their own
decisions, by delivering its dollars directly to the individual, based on
financial and medical need, entrusting and empowering citizens to choose their
own insurance and, inevitably, pay for more of their routine care like the
discerning, autonomous consumers we know them to be.
Our morbidly
obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric
surgery. The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the
challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies
elsewhere in life: “Prove to me why we should.”
Lost to
history is the fact that, in my OMB assignment, I was the first loud critic of
Congressional earmarks. I was also the first to get absolutely nowhere in
reducing them: first to rail and first to fail. They are a pernicious practice
and should be stopped. But, in the cause of national solvency, they are a
trifle. Talking much more about them, or “waste, fraud, and abuse,” trivializes
what needs to be done, and misleads our fellow citizens to believe that easy
answers are available to us. In this room, we all know how hard the answers are,
how much change is required.
And that
means nothing, not even the first and most important mission of government, our
national defense, can get a free pass. I served in two administrations that
practiced and validated the policy of peace through strength. It has served
America and the world with irrefutable success. But if our nation goes over a
financial Niagara, we won’t have much strength and, eventually, we won’t have
peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign
investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments
than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a “robust
strategy.”
I personally
favor restoring impoundment power to the presidency, at least on an emergency
basis. Having had this authority the last six years, and used it shall we say
with vigor, I can testify to its effectiveness, and to this finding: You’d be
amazed how much government you’ll never miss.
The nation
must be summoned to General Quarters in the cause of economic growth. The
friends of freedom always favor a growing economy as the wellspring of
individual opportunity and a bulwark against a domineering state. But here,
doctrinal debates are unnecessary; the arithmetic tells it all. We don’t have a
prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of
almost unprecedented duration. Every other goal, however worthy, must be tested
against and often subordinated to actions that spur the faster expansion of the
private sector on which all else depends.
A friend of
mine attended a recent meeting of the NBA leadership, at which a small-market
owner, whom I won’t name but will mention is also a member of the U.S. Senate,
made an impassioned plea for more sharing of revenue by the more successful
teams. At a coffee break, Mr. Prokhorov, the new Russian owner of the New
Jersey Nets, murmured to my friend, “We tried that, you know. It doesn’t work.”
Americans
have seen these last two years what doesn’t work. The failure of national
economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that
uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the
future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national
morale as well as our material prosperity.
Here, too,
the room abounds with experts and good ideas, and the nation will need every
one. Just to name three: it’s time we had, in Bill Simon’s words “a tax system
that looks like someone designed it on purpose.” And the purpose should be
private growth. So lower and flatter, and completely flat is best. Tax
compensation but not the savings and investment without which the economy
cannot boom.
Second,
untie Gulliver. The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must
hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans. Today’s EPA
should be renamed the “Employment Prevention Agency.” After a two-year orgy of
new regulation, President Obama’s recent executive order was a wonderment, as
though the number one producer of rap music had suddenly expressed alarm about
obscenity.
In Indiana,
where our privatization of a toll road generated billions for reinvestment in
infrastructure, we can build in half the time at two-thirds the cost when we
use our own money only and are free from the federal rulebook. A moratorium on
new regulation is a minimal suggestion; better yet, move at least temporarily
to a self-certification regime that lets America build, and expand, and explore
now and settle up later in those few instances where someone colors outside the
lines.
Finally,
treat domestic energy production as the economic necessity it is and the job
creator it can be. Drill, and frack, and lease, and license, unleash in every
way the jobs potential in the enormous energy resources we have been denying
ourselves. And help our fellow citizens to understand that a poorer country
will not be a greener country, but its opposite. It is freedom and its fruits
that enable the steady progress we have made in preserving and protecting God’s
kingdom.
If this
strikes you as a project of unusual ambition, given the state of modern
politics, you are right. If it strikes you as too bold for our fellow Americans
to embrace, I believe you are wrong. Seven years as a practitioner in elective
politics tells me that history’s skeptics are wrong. That Americans, in a vast
majority, are still a people born for self-governance. They are ready to summon
the discipline to pay down our collective debts as they are now paying down
their own; to put the future before the present, their children’s interest
before their own.
Our
proposals will be labeled radical, but this is easy to rebut. Starting a new
retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of
Americans have already been through at work.
Opponents
will expect us to be defensive, but they have it backwards. When they call the
slightest spending reductions “painful”, we will say “If government spending
prevents pain, why are we suffering so much of it?” And “If you want to
experience real pain, just stay on the track we are on.” When they attack us
for our social welfare reforms, we will say that the true enemies of Social
Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo, and the
arithmetic backs us up.
They will
attack our program as the way of despair, but we will say no, America’s way
forward is brilliant with hope, as soon as we have dealt decisively with the
manageable problems before us.
2010 showed
that the spirit of liberty and independence is stirring anew, that a growing
number of Americans still hear Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory. But their
number will have to grow, and do so swiftly. Change of the dimension we need
requires a coalition of a dimension no one has recently assembled. And, unless
you disbelieve what the arithmetic of disaster is telling us, time is very
short.
Here I wish
to be very plainspoken: It is up to us to show, specifically, the best way back
to greatness, and to argue for it with all the passion of our patriotism. But,
should the best way be blocked, while the enemy draws nearer, then someone will
need to find the second best way. Or the third, because the nation’s survival
requires it.
Purity in
martyrdom is for suicide bombers. King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation
disappeared. Winston Churchill set aside his lifetime loathing of Communism in
order to fight World War II. Challenged as a hypocrite, he said that when the
safety of Britain was at stake, his “conscience became a good girl.” We are at
such a moment. I for one have no interest in standing in the wreckage of our
Republic saying “I told you so” or “You should’ve done it my way.”
We must be
the vanguard of recovery, but we cannot do it alone. We have learned in
Indiana, big change requires big majorities. We will need people who never tune
in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean. Who surf past C-SPAN to get to
SportsCenter. Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise
ship accessory.
The second
worst outcome I can imagine for next year would be to lose to the current
president and subject the nation to what might be a fatal last dose of statism.
The worst would be to win the election and then prove ourselves incapable of
turning the ship of state before it went on the rocks, with us at the helm.
So we must
unify America, or enough of it, to demand and sustain the Big Change we
propose. Here are a few suggestions:
We must
display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on
the first rung of life’s ladder. Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of
the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact
becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts. Our main task is not to
see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money
have a greater chance to earn some.
We should
address ourselves to young America at every opportunity. It is their futures
that today’s policies endanger, and in their direct interest that we propose a
new direction.
We should
distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all
government. After all, it is a new government we hope to form, a government we
will ask our fellow citizens to trust to make huge changes.
I urge a
similar thoughtfulness about the rhetoric we deploy in the great debate ahead.
I suspect everyone here regrets and laments the sad, crude coarsening of our
popular culture. It has a counterpart in the venomous, petty, often ad hominem
political discourse of the day.
When one of us – I confess sometimes it was yours truly – got a little hotheaded, President Reagan would admonish us, “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents.” Good advice, then and now.
When one of us – I confess sometimes it was yours truly – got a little hotheaded, President Reagan would admonish us, “Remember, we have no enemies, only opponents.” Good advice, then and now.
And besides,
our opponents are better at nastiness than we will ever be. It comes naturally.
Power to them is everything, so there’s nothing they won’t say to get it. The
public is increasingly disgusted with a steady diet of defamation, and prepared
to reward those who refrain from it. Am I alone in observing that one of
conservatism’s best moments this past year was a massive rally that came and
went from Washington without leaving any trash, physical or rhetorical, behind?
A more
affirmative, “better angels” approach to voters is really less an aesthetic
than a practical one: with apologies for the banality, I submit that, as we ask
Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they
liked us, just a bit.
Lastly,
critically, I urge great care not to drift into a loss of faith in the American
people. In speech after speech, article upon article, we remind each other how
many are dependent on government, or how few pay taxes, or how much essential
virtues like family formation or civic education have withered. All true. All
worrisome. But we must never yield to the self-fulfilling despair that these
problems are immutable, or insurmountable.
All great
enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that
Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for
self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of
God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.
History’s
assignment to this generation of freedom fighters is in one way even more
profound than the tests of our proud past. We are tasked to rebuild not just a
damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth
the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from
Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don’t believe in Americans,
who will?
I do
believe. I’ve seen it in the people of our very typical corner of the nation.
I’ve seen it in the hundred Indiana homes in which I have stayed overnight.
I’ve seen it in Hoosiers’ resolute support of limited government, their
willingness, even insistence, that government keep within the boundaries our
constitutional surveyors mapped out for it.
I’ve always
loved John Adams’ diary entry, written en route to Philadelphia, there to put
his life, liberty, and sacred honor all at risk. He wrote that it was all well
worth it because, he said, “Great things are wanted to be done.”
When he and
his colleagues arrived, and over the years ahead, they practiced the art of the
possible. They made compacts and concessions and, yes, compromises. They made
deep sectional and other differences secondary in pursuit of the grand prize of
freedom. They each argued passionately for the best answers as they saw them,
but they never permitted the perfect to be the enemy of the historic good they
did for us, and all mankind. They gave us a Republic, citizen Franklin said, if
we can keep it.
Keeping the
Republic is the great thing that is wanted to be done, now, in our time, by us.
In this room are convened freedom’s best friends but, to keep our Republic,
freedom needs every friend it can get. Let’s go find them, and befriend them,
and welcome them to the great thing that is wanted to be done in our day.
God bless
this meeting and the liberty which makes it possible.
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