Michael Barone focuses his latest Washington Examiner column on the governors of New Jersey and Indiana, who both delivered speeches to D.C. crowds in recent days:
In style they’re a contrast. Daniels is slight, balding and spoke quietly from a carefully prepared text. Christie is large and spoke bombastically without notes. But in substance they were much the same.
They were both mightily concerned with what Daniels called “the red menace” — “the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence.” He warned that “federal spending commitments now in place will bring about the leviathan state” and “the slippage of the United States into a gray parity with the other nations of this Earth.”
The response, he said, must be “the creation of new Social Security and Medicare compacts” that “reserve their funds for those most in need of them.” And “our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery.”
Daniels also called for changes in taxes, regulation and energy policy, and he roiled some conservatives by saying that defense shouldn’t get a free pass. He roiled others by ignoring the cultural issues on which he suggested last June we should have a “truce.”
But his central message was that Republicans must address entitlements — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Which Barack Obama conspicuously failed to do in the budget plan he released a few days after Daniels’ speech.
Christie was less elegant and even more blunt than his Hoosier colleague. Drawing on his struggles with New Jersey’s public employee unions over pensions and benefits, he turned to national issues.
“My children’s future and your children’s future are more important than political strategy,” he began.” You’re going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security. Whoa, I just said it, and I’m still standing here. I did not vaporize.
“We have to reform Medicare because it costs too much and it is going to bankrupt us. Once again lightning did not come through the windows and strike me dead. And we have to fix Medicaid because it’s not only bankrupting the federal government, it’s bankrupting every state government.”
