Mitch Daniels Positioning Himself As The Thinking Person's Republican Presidential Candidate

The whole idea of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels doing a media sit down with a group that includes Rick Hertzberg, Josh Marshall, and Michael Kinsley is a bit odd. Even odder is that he seems to have wanted those guys to like him! For example, he seems to think that you need more tax revenue to balance the budget:

"My brethren haven't stepped up," he said. By this he meant—I'm summarizing, not quoting— that the current G.O.P. candidates (a) haven't gone after defense spending with any seriousness, if at all, and (b) can't admit that because deficits occur when expenditures exceed revenues, a bit more of the latter, not just a lot less of the former, might be in order. To be sure, he dismissed Democratic demands for letting rich folks' income-tax rates revert to pre-Bush levels as bad-for-business "theology," and he supports the basic Ryan framework of lower marginal rates plus closing (mostly unspecified) loopholes and deductions. But unlike Ryan, who would use all the money from loophole-closing to cut tax rates, Daniels would use some of it to cut deficits. The net result, he claimed, would be more revenues, with the rich paying more, and a larger share, than they do now. Feeble? Perhaps, but he is a Republican.

He also seems to want us to think that he's not a bloodthirsty madman:

Jamie Rubin asked him a clever question, right out of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?": if he had just one phone call to make about some foreign policy issue and he could call either Richard Lugar or John McCain, which would it be? After a little hemming and hawing, he said that he is "always comfortable" talking with Lugar. Though of course he respects McCain, too, he hastened to add. Maybe he was just being nice about his state's senior senator, but I hope he was expressing a preference for diplomacy (Lugar's M.O.) over warmongering (McCain's).

As a strategy for winning a Republican presidential primary, this doesn't make a ton of sense. But on another level, it actually does make a ton of sense. After all, any given candidate is always unlikely to win. Mitch Daniels probably won't win. He probably won't win with this strategy and he probably won't win with any other strategy either. So maybe the best thing to do is to position himself in a way that's in line with his existing brand. If it doesn't work this time around, maybe Barack Obama will get re-elected and conservatives will say to themselves "we should have gone with Mitch Daniels." Meanwhile, for all the wonky talk he's still pretty damn right-wing, defunding Planned Parenthood and voucherizing Indiana's public schools.