David Brooks could be right in estimating Mitch Daniels as the GOP's "strongest candidate for the presidency." On the other hand, for now, that's not saying much.
The party's current crop of presidential candidates includes a multiple personality, a barely rehabilitated neoconfederate, a habitually hypocritical womanizer who -- praise Jesus! -- God has forgiven, a once-qualified and passably competent governor who's degenerated into the vilest of demagoguery, and a Baptist preacher.
Now comes, maybe, the W. administration's massive-deficit sorcerer -- who at CPAC "spoke for those who believe the country’s runaway debt is the central moral challenge of our time" -- yet even he, as not unjustifiably assessed, is the "party's strongest candidate for the presidency." You don't say.
Which, in fact, Brooks doesn't, since he also broods that Daniels "is seriously thinking about not running." Why? "[B]ecause Daniels," ventures Brooks, "is a normal person who doesn’t have an insatiable desire for higher office."
Well, I can't know about that, since I can't get inside Daniels' motivational sensibilities. But it could be, it just could be, that Daniels' desire for higher office is as insatiable as John Thune's, but like Thune, he knows that in 2012 his Democratic opponent is looking unbeatable. Since leaving the Bush administration, Daniels has learned to add, all the way up to 270.
One never knows, of course. Daniels' coyness about future plans could be but typical pre-presidential-candidacy coyness. If so, its contours are mighty strange as a setup for the suddenness of next year, although his recent admonitions are perhaps a longer-term plea for party sanity.
To wit, Brooks notes that Daniels "rankled some in the [CPAC] audience" by declaring that "purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers." With what seems an intellectual commonness to those on the outside but was likely a challenging insight to those on the inside, Daniels bluntly suggested the Republican Party "will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean."
Heresy. Stake-burning heresy. It recommends outreach to moderate voters, which further and quite logically implies a moderation of message. And to the modern GOP, that's like asking a Pentecostal pulpit-pounder to cool the temps in Hell.
As though really asking for it, Daniels also told the Weekly Standard, as Brooks reminds us, "that Republicans should declare a truce on social issues until the debt crisis is taken care of." Adds Brooks through magnificent understatement: "A few activists are still upset."
So who knows. Maybe Daniels will run and maybe he won't. Against the immense formidability of President Obama, the will or the won't makes little difference; either way, in 2013 Daniels will be outside the White House looking in. What does seem profoundly likely, though, is that Daniels recognizes his party's presidency-losing lunacy as his party is ideologically configured today, and he is softly attempting to turn it centerward for 2016 -- which is what I once thought Tim Pawlenty would attempt in 2012, before he went crazy.