Mitchell Elias "Mitch" Daniels, Jr., (born April 7, 1949) is the 49th and current Governor of the U.S. state of Indiana. A Republican, he began his first four-year term as governor on January 10, 2005, and was elected to his second term by an 18-point margin on November 4, 2008. Previously, he was the Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush. He was formerly Senior Vice President of Eli Lilly and Company, Indiana's largest corporation, where he was in charge of the corporation's business strategy. He is cited as a rising star in the Republican Party, and was widely speculated to be a candidate for President of the United States in 2012 before choosing not to run.
During his first year in office, he proposed a number of controversial plans to balance the state's $24 billion budget through tax increases, budget cuts, and privatization plans. Because of the opposition led by Republican Speaker of the House Brian Bosma, only two of the new taxes were approved, but his other budget austerity measures were approved. Spending was reduced by $440 million through budget cuts and privatization plans, and the annual budget growth was cut to 2.8% from the previous 5.9%.
Support for a switch to daylight saving time, the privatization of the Indiana Toll Road, and the closure of many license branches brought him into conflict with Democrats; and, in 2005, his approval ratings dropped to a low of 42%. In 2007, he began pressing for constitutional changes to cap state property taxes at 1–3% of value. The caps were approved by the Indiana General Assembly as statute the same year, and added to the state constitution by a 2008 ballot measure. His support for the property tax limits, and its subsequent adoption, helped raise his popularity and secure his re-election bid.
His second term saw a large drop in state revenues, leading to major spending cuts to maintain a balanced budget. He was aided in passing the agenda by the election of a large Republican majority to both houses of the Indiana General Assembly in 2010. In an attempt to block his agenda, the Democratic minority in the Indiana House of Representatives staged a legislative walkout for several weeks, preventing the passage of any legislation. After the return of the minority, the majority of the Daniels' backed agenda was passed; education reform bills were enacted, creating a statewide school voucher program, restricting collective bargaining rights for teachers, and instituting a merit pay system for public school personnel. Immigrations laws penalizing companies who employed undocumented works and denied in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants was enacted. A stronger abortion regulation law was enacted that outlawed abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy, state funding was withdrawn from all healthcare providers that offered abortion services, and the corporate income tax rate was lowered.
Mitchell Elias Daniels, Jr., was born in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, to Dorothy Mae (née Wilkes) and Mitchell Elias Daniels, Sr. His paternal grandparents were Christian immigrants from Syria. Daniels has been honored by the Arab-American Institute with the 2011 Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service. Daniels spent his early childhood years in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia. The Daniels family moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania in 1959 when his father accepted a job at the Indianapolis headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Pittman-Moore. Then 11-year-old Daniels was accustomed to the mountains, and he at first disliked the flatland of central Indiana. He was still in grade school at the time of the move and first attended Delaware Trail Elementary, Westlane Junior High School, and North Central High School. In high school he was student body president. After graduation in 1967, Daniels was named one of Indiana's Presidential Scholars—the state’s top male high school graduate that year—by President Lyndon Johnson.
Daniels toured several northeastern universities, including Yale and Dartmouth College. He chose Princeton University because he preferred the campus. In 1971, Daniels earned a Bachelor's degree with Honors from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His high grades allowed him to gain entry to Georgetown University Law Center where earned a Juris Doctor with Honors.
In 1970, while an undergraduate student at Princeton, he and two roommates were arrested for possession of marijuana, LSD, and illicit prescription drugs. He spent two nights in jail. In a plea bargain, he pled guilty to "maintaining a common nuisance" and was fined $350. Daniels told The Daily Princetonian in 2011 that "justice was served," and has disclosed the arrest on job applications, and spoke about the incident in columns in the Indianapolis Star and the Washington Post.
Daniels had his first experience in politics while still a teenager when, in 1968, he worked on the unsuccessful campaign of fellow Hoosier and Princeton alumnus William Ruckelshaus, who was running for the U.S. Senate. After the campaign Ruckelshaus helped Daniels secure an internship in the office of then–Indianapolis mayor Richard Lugar. In 1971, Daniels worked on Lugar's re-election campaign and then joined his mayoral staff. Within three years, he became Lugar's principal assistant. After Lugar was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Daniels followed him to Washington, D.C. as his Chief of Staff.
Daniels served as Chief of Staff during Lugar's first term (1977–82); and, during this time, he met Cheri Herman, who was working for the National Park Service. The two married in 1978 and had four daughters; they divorced in 1993 and Cheri married a second husband. Cheri later divorced her second husband and remarried Daniels in 1997.
In 1983, when Lugar was elected Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Daniels was appointed its Executive Director. Serving in that position (1983–84), he played a major role in keeping the GOP in control of the Senate. Daniels was also manager of three successful re-election campaigns for Lugar. In August 1985, Daniels became chief political advisor and liaison to President Ronald Reagan.
In 1987, Daniels returned to Indiana as President and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. In 1988, Dan Quayle was elected Vice President of the United States, and Governor of Indiana Robert D. Orr offered to appoint Daniels to Quayle's vacant Senate seat, but Daniels declined fearing it would force him to spend too much time away from his family.
In 1990, Daniels left the Hudson Institute to accept a position at Eli Lilly and Company, the largest corporation headquartered in Indiana at that time. He was first promoted to President of North American Operations (1993–97) and then to Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategy and Policy (1997–2001). During his time at Lilly, Daniels managed a successful strategy to deflect attacks on Lilly's Prozac product by a public relations campaign against the drug being waged by the Church of Scientology. In one interview in 1992, Daniels said of the organization that "it is no church", and that people on Prozac were less likely to become victims of the Church. The Church responded by suing Daniels in a libel suit for $20 million. A judge dismissed the case.
Eli Lilly experienced dramatic growth during Daniels' tenure at the company. Prozac sales made up 30–40% of Lilly's income during the mid to late 1990s, and Lilly doubled its assets to $12.8 billion and doubled its revenue to $10 billion during the same period. When Daniels later became Governor of Indiana, he drew heavily on his former Lilly colleagues to serve as advisers and agency mangers.
During the same period, Daniels also served on the board of directors of the Indianapolis Power & Light (IPL). He resigned from the IPL Board in 2001 to join the federal government, and sold his IPL stock for $1.45 million. Later that year the value declined when Virginia-based AES Corporation bought IPL. Indiana Securities Division subsequently investigated the sale and found no wrongdoing, but opponents brought up the sale and questioned it during his later election campaign.
In January 2001, Daniels accepted President George W. Bush's invitation to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He served as Director from January 2001 through June 2003. In this role he was also a member of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council.
During his time as the director of the OMB, Bush referred to him as "the Blade," for his noted acumen at budget cutting. The $2.13 trillion budget Daniels submitted to Congress in 2001 would have made deep cuts in many agencies to accommodate the tax cuts being made, but few of the spending cuts were actually approved by Congress. During Daniels' 29-month tenure in the position, the projected federal budget surplus of $236 billion declined to a $400 billion deficit, due an economic downturn, and failure to enact spending cuts to offset the tax reductions.
Conservative columnist Ross Douthat has noted that Daniels "carried water, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, for some of the Bush administration’s more egregious budgets made dubious public arguments in support of his boss’s agenda." Daniels was responsible for estimating the cost of the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom. The operation was estimated to last six months, and did not include a projection of the long-term cost of maintaining a military presence in the region after its immediate occupation. In 2002, Assistant to the President on Economic Policy Lawrence B. Lindsey estimated the cost at between $100–$200 billion, much higher than Daniels' estimate. Daniels called Lindsey's estimate "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50–$60 billion. President Bush ultimately requested $75 billion to finance the operation during the fiscal year, and according to a 2010 Congressional Research Service report, the first fiscal year of the war cost $51 billion. The failure to provide long term cost estimates led opponents to claim that Daniels and the administration had suggested the entire war would cost less $60 billion.
Although Daniels had claimed to be reluctant to seek higher office, many media outlets, including Politico, The Weekly Standard, Forbes, The Washington Post, CNN, The Economist, and The Indianapolis Star began to speculate that Daniels may intend to seek the Republican nomination for President in 2012 after he joined the national debate on cap and trade legislation by penning a response in the Wall Street Journal to policies espoused by the Democratic-majority Congress and the White House in August 2010. The speculation has included Daniels' record of reforming government, reducing taxes, balancing the budget, and connecting with voters in Indiana. Despite his signing into law of bills that toughened drug enforcement, regulated abortion, and a defense of marriage act, he has angered some conservative because of his call for a "truce" on social issues so the party can focus on fiscal issues. His "willingness to consider tax increases to rectify a budget deficit" has been another source of contention.
In August 2010, The Economist praised Daniels' "reverence for restraint and efficacy" and concluded that "He is, in short, just the kind of man to relish fixing a broken state – or country." Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine called Daniels "a smart and effective leader who is a serious thinker about history, politics, and policy," and wrote that "Daniels, like former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, is a Republican who knows how to govern and can do it well." In February 2011, David Brooks of the New York Times described Daniels as the "Party's strongest candidate," predicting that he "couldn't match Obama in grace and elegance, but he could on substance."
On December 12, 2010, Daniels suggested in a local interview that he would decide on a White House run before May 2011.
Different groups and individuals pressured Daniels to run for office. In response to early speculation, Daniels dismissed a presidential run in June 2009, saying "I've only ever run for or held one office. It's the last one I'm going to hold." However, in February 2010 he told a Washington Post reporter that he was open to the idea of running in 2012.
On March 6, 2011, Daniels was the winner of an Oregon (Republican Party) straw poll. Daniels drew 29.33% of the vote, besting second place finisher Mitt Romney (22.66%) and third place finisher Sarah Palin (18.22%), and was the winner of a similar straw poll in the state of Washington. On May 5, 2011, Daniels told an interviewer that he would announce "within weeks" his decision of whether or not to run for the Republican Presidential nomination. He said he felt he was not prepared to debate on all the national issues, like foreign policy, and needed time to better understand the issues and put together formal positions. Later in May, as the Republican field began to resolve with announcements and withdrawals of other candidates, Time said "[e]ven setting aside his somewhat unusual family situation, Daniels would need to hurry to put together an organization" and raise enough money if he intended to run.
Daniels announced he would not seek the Republican nomination for the presidency on the night of May 21, 2011 via an email to the press, citing family constraints and the loss of privacy the family would experience should he become a candidate
