Here are the Crises. Where are the Statesmen?

What should we expect of our next president? What is the defining crisis of our times? It would help if we had a History of the Twenty-first Century, but that won’t be available for many years to come.

The remarkable thing about great statesmen is that, as though by intuitive grasp of the relative importance of things, they seem to see the present in the clear light of the future. Churchill, in the political wilderness, saw the monstrous threat of Nazism long before his more respectable contemporaries did. It was not a recent insight that he shared in his “Their Finest Hour” speech when he cast the coming Battle of Britain as a contest for “the survival of Christian civilization” and “the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

When we look for a presidential candidate, we are looking for a statesman.

Mitch Daniels says the great crisis is financial. There is a strong case to be made for this. But statesmen are also able to read and lead the public. Daniels stumbled in this. Last year, he told Andy Ferguson of the Weekly Standard that the next president would have to call a truce on social issues to focus on our nation’s more immediate and existential crisis of crippling debt. "It is just a suggestion I made once," he told World reporter Edward Lee Pitts. Both Pitts and Ferguson demonstrate that Daniels is pro-life to his bones. Ferguson quotes Curt Smith, head of the Indiana Family Institute, saying, “He has a deep faith, he’s totally pro-life, and he walks the talk.” Perhaps it was just a stumble. Perhaps he is a great man, and not the bean counter he appeared to be at that moment.

Newt Gingrich tells us that Islam will swallow us if we do not rally against it. This could be true, and rally we must. But in America, unlike Europe which has already committed moral and demographic suicide, we still have a backbone to stiffen, and our uniquely free society encourages Muslim Americans to moderate and assimilate. As for Newt, he is not a great man. He is strong on insight and analysis, but profoundly deficient in character. No man as morally hollow as Newt Gingrich should be President. We suffered that from 1992-2000. Newt is the Bill Clinton of the right

In yesterday's Worldmag column, I make my case that abortion and the disintegration of the family are the great moral crises that threaten to destroy the nation ("Facing the Crisis of Our Times").

As for abortion in particular, not only does it present serious demographic and workforce challenges, it is a moral blight that invites God's righteous judgment.

We need to repent of our evil, return to the Lord, and reform our ways. George Washington saw the flourishing of our nation as inseparable from our national repentance before God’s righteous majesty and from our trust above all in the strength of his arm on our behalf. He wrote at time when the Lord’s government of the nations was commonly recognized and with a clear political conscience for doing so.

In his General Orders of March 6, 1776, as Commander of the Continental Army, General Washington declared, “a day of fasting, prayer, and humiliation to implore the Lord, the Giver of all victory, to pardon our manifold sins and wickedness’s (sic.), and that it would please him to bless the Continental Arms, with his divine favor and protection.” (I thank Dr. Peter Lillback for sending me this reference.)

Getting Serious About Choosing a President

Barack Obama is governing so poorly after only his first year--on the economy (what he hasn't yet destroyed or nationalized), getting beyond partisan politics (he threw that ball to Nancy Pelosi and company), fighting the War on Terror (Holder's got that covered), appeasing international monsters (hyper-active, with predictably poor results), and health-care reform (a domestic monster of his own making that voters had to slay)--that Republican talent is already viewing 2012 with hope.

Of course, the names Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin continue to echo out of 2008, but I cannot imagine a Fox News-Entertainment personality making a serious Presidential bid. Once you sign a deal for a show or a regular comment spot, you've made your choice.

So in a nation of 300 million people, in a party largely respectful of and inspired by our glorious founding principles, there must be someone under present conditions who is qualified and ready to step forward and lead.

I have never been a close observer of Indiana politics (I usually fall asleep when driving through Indiana, even when I'm doing the driving), but others have been paying attention to their two term Governor, Mitch Daniels.

George Will sees him as the 2012 nominee, with Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running-mate ("Charting Our Way to Solvency"). This strikes me as a team of merely economic conservatives, though I'm interested in hearing more. Governor Daniels worked thirteen years as an executive for the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company and for 27 months as George W. Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget (that's a long time in White House years). As Governor, he managed Indiana into a AAA credit rating, unprecedented for the state. He's also a lawyer (Georgetown).

On the understanding that you can't have everything, these may be just the qualifications we need at this time. The premise behind Will's prediction is that the nationally crippling Obama deficit, the shriveled and humiliated U.S. dollar, and, on top of these catastrophes, the bankrupting burden of the looming explosion of baby-boomer retirees drawing mercilessly on an already penniless Social Security and Medicare entitlement system, present a greater threat to our national security than al Qaeda terrorism and all the rogue states combined. When a geopolitical rival like China holds a lethal portion of our national debt, the connection between national solvency and national security needs no further argument.

But Will is not alone in this judgment. Back in December 2008, a month after Barack Obama was elected President and Daniels himself was re-elected Governor, Michael Barone noticed that Daniels won his state 58-40% in a year when Republicans did very poorly and Obamamania was in the air, and in a state that Obama carried. Barone goes into detail as to how Daniels pulled this off, and how also he is a strong candidate for the White House in 2012.

Then last spring, William Kristol took notice of Daniels' commencement address at Butler University in which Daniels spoke bluntly and unflatteringly about his own baby-boomer generation. Kristol quoted from it at length ("A Hoosier in the White House?"). Here's a sample:

All our lives, it's been all about us. We were the "Me Generation." We wore t-shirts that said "If it feels good, do it." The year of my high school commencement, a hit song featured the immortal lyric "Na, na, nananana live for today." As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish. Our current Baby Boomer President has written two eloquent, erudite books, both about himself.

As a generation, we did tend to live for today. We have spent more and saved less than any previous Americans. Year after year, regardless which party we picked to lead the country, we ran up deficits that have multiplied the debt you and your children will be paying off your entire working lives. Far more burdensome to you mathematically, we voted ourselves increasing levels of Social Security pensions and Medicare health care benefits, but never summoned the political maturity to put those programs on anything resembling a sound actuarial footing.

In sum, our parents scrimped and saved to provide us a better living standard than theirs; we borrowed and splurged and will leave you a staggering pile of bills to pay. It's been a blast; good luck cleaning up after us....

Great. My vote is his to lose. Kristol concludes: "After what will be, in 2012, two decades of Clinton, Bush and Obama, maybe the nation will be ready to elect a Boomer president who disdains his own generation, and urges younger Americans to reject Boomer vanities and self-indulgence in the name of freedom and greatness?"

After the Obama debacle, the country may be looking once again for a grown up with real life and executive experience in the White House. Imagine that?

Here is Daniels himself writing in the Wall Street Journal--"The Coming Reset in State Government: My fellow governors and I are likely facing a permanent reduction in tax revenues" (September 9, 2009).

Here is Kimberley Strassel's WSJ interview with the Governor.