If we’re all going to have to put up with the Media Village courtiers’ touting Mitch Daniels as the serious GOP candidate for serious times, at least we’ve got Indiana-based blogger Doghouse Riley at Bats Left / Throws Right to keep us informed of the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit:
INTERESTING how this seems to be the week when Beltway insiders have decided to start the Republican Presidential campaign, with or without Republican Presidential candidates…
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The unwilling, indolent, but semi-dedicated Daniels watcher, for example, has been pummeled daily by the Dailies… you couldn’t swing a cat this week without hitting Mitch Daniels, unless you took care to swing it a minimum of five feet off the ground.
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Marcus, who says she couldn’t imagine actually voting for Daniels, nevertheless thinks his Seriousness would make Obama a better candidate, thus raising the question of the last time she, or anyone else, was justified in believing Serious Issues actually enter into one of our Presidential campaigns, let alone make either candidate “better”. I’m going with Grant-Greeley.
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Despite all the grudging it requires, I respect the job Team Daniels has done to this point, considering the hand they have to work with. They shoehorned a malignant and diminutive wonk into Lamar Alexander’s Jes’ Folks campaign, and even found a plaid shirt that would fit him, with the result that, five years later, Rich Lowry would tell the world (ha ha! He told readers of National Review! Exaggeration for comic effect) what an authentic consumer of fried pork and pig feed Daniels was, even though no one with passing familiarity of the genre could possibly believe it. Following his proposal, ten minutes after his first inauguration, to raise income taxes on the top earners in Indiana in order to pay to reduce the “deficit” and burnish his combover, Team Daniels saw to it the man never spoke extemporaneously in public again. After a couple months of watching him lunge across tables or run down city streets to grasp the kneecaps of hecklers, they saw to it no one with anything over a 12 handicap would ever get within a hundred yards of him again, save Fairgoers and photo-op truck-stop waitresses, widely spaced. Their man somehow went from Bush popularity ratings in 2007 to a landslide victory only partly explained by his opponent’s non-existence and his own enormous war chest. The Post marriage article has Daniels’ opponents running from his “intellectual heft”; this for a man whose five favorite books are Atlas Shrugged…
Go over, enjoy the man’s oeuvre, and let’s hope we don’t break Blogger again.