Mitch Daniels at CPAC warns of a new Red Scare
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the last of the possible Republican presidential candidates to address CPAC on Friday, strode to the podium at tonight’s Ronald Reagan Banquet and turned back the clock to the 1980s: the thing we have to fear, he said, is the growing Red Threat.
“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,” he said. “As in those days, the American project is menaced by a survival-level threat.”
“I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence,” he added. “It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink…”
Social conservatives are, perhaps understandably, upset at the idea of taking a backseat until the budget gets balanced. And so they aren’t too thrilled with Daniels.
The same can’t be said of the Reagan-friendly older crowd at the CPAC banquet. They ate up his speech, giving Daniels a big round of applause and laughing at Daniels’ many puns.
“Our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery,” Daniels said, to a collective chuckle from the crowd.
Daniels made his case that the country was in deep, serious trouble with its debt, even calling for cuts to defense spending (something that would have been big news had he said it while running the Bush budget).
Daniels’ other solutions were pretty straight-line Republican: limit the EPA, drill, cut, eliminate taxes on, privatize, etc.
“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 programs, we will say the true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo, and the arithmetic backs us up.”