In the Washington Post, former Indiana governor and Purdue University president Mitch Daniels has written a tribute to former president Calvin Coolidge on the centenary of his assuming the presidency. “A nation drowning in debt and in serious need of a cultural course correction could do much worse than to examine the life of the quiet man from Massachusetts,” Daniels writes. He proceeds to examine the many virtues of this unassuming and principled man, virtues skillfully outlined by Amity Shlaes (whose biography of Coolidge he mentions) in National Review, and by me (referencing Shlaes and other examples of his character).
Daniels, famously averse to the spotlight and concerned with fiscal rectitude, undoubtedly sees a lot of himself in Silent Cal. He is right to do so. Concerning the latter quality, Daniels cites Coolidge’s limiting government employees to one pencil at a time. As Indiana governor, Daniels similarly targeted font sizes for government documents (to save paper), printer ink (preferring black and white over color), and paper clips (state agencies that had extra swapped with those that ran out). Outside of office settings, he cut the number of state-owned vehicles:
“In the early days of the administration he had a hunch that the government owned more cars than it could use,” says Ryan Kitchell, a Daniels staffer. “Lieutenants were dispatched to the parking lots of state facilities to place pennies on a tire of each car. They returned in a month and if the pennies were still there, we said, ‘Give us the keys.'”
Presumably he took back the pennies as well.
The former governor’s laments about the lack of Coolidges nowadays are well taken. “Where one wishes most for another Coolidge is where we are least likely to find one, in the realm of persona, style and personal conduct,” he writes. He continues:
We’re mired in a hot-dog, look-at-me, dance-in-the-end-zone world. Success in public capacities seems reliant not on the quality of officeholders’ ideas or effectiveness, but on their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other “performative” arts. It’s hard to imagine anyone more countercultural, less in sync with today’s zeitgeist, than Silent Cal.
He concludes that, “improbable as it is, given the dominant prejudices and cultural predilections of our time, America would benefit greatly from the arrival of another ‘great refrainer’ on the national stage.”
Why yes, it would. Which is why I continue to find Daniels’s decision earlier this year not to run for Senate in Indiana so frustrating. He would have made a great candidate, as I argued at the time. I saw in him, in addition to his other merits, the very characteristics he now laments as lacking in modern politics:
In the profiles of him as he mulled a 2012 presidential run, and in the one time I met him in person (full disclosure) as he made his end-of-governorship motorcycle tour of Indiana, Daniels evinced a fundamental modesty and aversion to the spotlight. These were characteristics that made him rare then and that are almost unheard-of now. If there is any sense in which Daniels is a throwback, it is that. But maybe we could use more of that kind of throwback in our politics.
He justified his decision with the sort of careful reflection that has marked his time in public life. Though even then, he teased us by daring to imagine a hypothetical one-term-from-the-start tenure in which he would have “devoted six years to causes” he thought “critical to the long-term safety and prosperity of our country.” Yes, as I said earlier this year, I cannot begrudge him his choice. But by making it, he has further abandoned the field of modern politics to vainglorious blowhards obsessed with “their cleverness and audacity in sound bites, tweeting and the other ‘performative’ arts,” as he put it. The likelihood that the ranks of both elected and aspiring officeholders will fill up with such specimens, who tend to lack the kind of introspection that might lead them to imagine anything contrary to their will to power, has only increased.
Meanwhile, decent men, such as Calvin Coolidge and Mitch Daniels, become rarer. Our political environment consequently deteriorates (thereby becoming even more inhospitable to good men and conducive to bad ones, a vicious cycle). By praising Calvin Coolidge and lamenting the dearth of Coolidge and his virtues in politics today, Daniels has cruelly reminded us that, when he had the chance to do something about it, he declined. The political-leadership deficit is one this fiscally fastidious fellow is apparently uninterested in doing anything about.