Yep, Mark Levin, the talk radio fanatic who took Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell seriously as candidates, now says Mitch Daniels is unqualified for the presidency. The Daily Caller describes his monologue:
“Mr. Daniels, you get a little ‘x,’” he said. “You’re too weak. You don’t see the full horizon. You’re ready to battle on some turf, but on way too much you’re ready to surrender the turf. You should be speaking out in defense of your fellow governor from Wisconsin and you’re not. You should be encouraging exactly what the legislature is doing in — Indiana, to attract more and more enterprise and create more jobs but you’re not. That’s why you’re not presidential. Like I say, you may be a great governor. I don’t know. I don’t live in Indiana but I do live in the United States and you get a little ‘x’ next to your name.”
Over at Big Government, Mike Flynn is piling on:
First, I need to start with a confession and a plea for forgiveness. For the last two years, when the DC parlor game of “who should run in 2012″ came up, I had one answer: Mitch Daniels. Sure, he was kind of boring. But, I thought that after four years of the “flash and dash”, “hope and change” flimflammery of the Obama Administration, boring would be right up the voters’ alley. Daniels was competent, in precisely the kind of way you trust-and want-your accountant to be competent. He was, I thought, the man for the times.
I was wrong. I am sorry. It turns out Mitch Daniels is a 1990s conservative; hesitant, afraid to stand on principle, desperate to be loved by editorial writers from the dying newspaper industry. (Newt Daniels?) He needs everybody to support him and stands ready to jettison any principled policy position for an extra few points bump in the polls. No doubt, he wants to ‘rise above’ politics, but he has personally risen so far above it that one wonders why he even bothers. He wasn’t pressed into service as Governor and presumptive presidential candidate. He chose that path, presumably, because he had a vision for how to lead. Again, and I will say this a lot, I was wrong.
These people claim that the United States is on the edge of a fiscal cliff, that what they care about is liberty. But at every opportunity they show that an actual record of fiscal conservatism in government isn't nearly as important to them as polarizing rhetoric.
Avik Roy has a defense of Daniels up at National Review. Which is encouraging.