OR-GOV: Chris Dudley says Mitch Daniels is his role model. Yikes.

Kari Chisholm

In his endorsement interview with Willamette Week (see video), Chris Dudley said that he admired the leadership of the Governor of Indiana, Republican Mitch Daniels.

In particular, said Dudley, he admired how Daniels "getting spending under control, making spending more efficient, prioritizing areas that government is focused on." Dudley didn't say this, but he almost surely sees Daniels as a role model for another reason - he'd never run for office before running for Governor.

I have two thoughts about that.

First, I'm not a fan of Mitch Daniels (and worked on a campaign to unseat him in 2008), but you can't say he was unprepared to be Governor. He was a chief of staff to Senator Richard Lugar, a top aide to President Ronald Reagan, president of a conservative think tank, a top executive at Eli Lilly (a big pharmaceutical company and major Indiana employer), and George W. Bush's first budget director.

By contrast, Chris Dudley was an unremarkable basketball player, participated in negotiating one NBA contract, raised money for a diabetes charity, was a celebrity rainmaker for an investment company, and served as an assistant coach at Lake Oswego High School.

If Mitch Daniels is your model for what to look for in a Governor, Chris Dudley ain't your candidate.

Second, when Chris Dudley says that he wants to follow in Mitch Daniels' footsteps, let's be clear what he's talking about.

What Mitch Daniels is known for is privatizing state services and turning over some state highways to a foreign corporation and creating privately-run toll roads.

Here's the short story on the Daniels push to privatize state services, from Pam Martens at Counterpunch:

In 2006, Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana privatized the state’s welfare services, handing a $1.34 billion contract to IBM. A computer company, engaged in gigabits and memory chips, was entrusted with getting food stamps and Medicaid and welfare payments into the hands of the hungry and the poor. The previous Indiana system of face to face meetings with case workers was sacked for automation and call centers. After legislators heard endless stories of life-saving prescriptions not being filled, people with less than $100 in assets not receiving food stamps in the legally mandated response time, call centers not picking up the phone or losing the calls, paperwork disappearing, together with a class action lawsuit being filed, Governor Daniels finally sacked IBM last month.

As for the Indiana Toll Road, here's the story.

Rather than invest directly in highway improvements, Daniels leased the highway to a group of foreign investors. In exchange for the right to toll the highway (some of which had already been a toll road), the Spanish-Australian consortium gave Indiana a one-time payment of $3.85 billion.

What's wrong with that? Well, aside from philosophical concerns about whether state highways should be run by the state or by a foreign corporation, there's this:

Mitch Daniels likes to tout his success in reducing state borrowing. But when you give up a long-term revenue stream in exchange for a lump sum payment up front, that's EXACTLY what you're doing -- it's just debt by another name. Either way, you're making your long-term fiscal situation worse and solving a short-term problem now.

Mitch Daniels. Not what I want for Oregon.

By Kari Chisholm Oct. 05, 2010