There’s no question that I am increasingly earning the classification of an “old guy.” Many of my friends are five or 10 years older and will scoff at that. They often remind me that I still don’t have a clue. Maybe that’s why I hang around them. But I digress already.
The point is, at 72, I seem to be feeling those aches and pains just a little more with each passing month. I did not understand 99 percent of the Super Bowl commercials. And I am also, it seems, increasingly qualified to be considered an “old Republican.”
I have heard that this may date back to when Richard Lugar lost his re-election bid 10 years ago, but the latest chapter of how things are changing started when our Congressional Representative, Jim Banks, declared his candidacy for the Indiana U.S. Senate seat that Mike Braun is vacating in order to run for governor. There was immediate speculation that former Gov. Mitch Daniels was also going to run. I followed the news mostly in the national media while traveling; the Wall Street Journal opined that such a race would be “a productive exercise” — it would be a contest between the “old Republicans” and the “new Republicans.”
Although we were not home to witness them, I understand there were some TV commercials that cast Daniels in a negative light, saying — among other things — that at his age (73), it might be time to retire. Daniels, as you may remember, made it one of his principles to never run a negative ad against his political opponents. That’s one irony, the other being that these same folks have no problem with their preferred candidate for president in 2024 being 78 years old by the time he would ascend to the throne. But again, I digress.
The ad was paid for by the Club for Growth, an Indiana-based political action committee led by David McIntosh who later wrote a letter-to-the-editor rebuttal to the WSJ that distorted Daniels’ record only in the manner that used to be reserved for Democratic opponents. Welcome to, apparently, the new Republican Party.
I prefer the old. It fought for balanced budgets and responsible spending. It once eliminated Congressional earmarks that allows senators and representatives to get federal money spent on pet projects in their home districts that will help them get re-elected. The practice was voted back in by a secret-ballot vote more than a year ago.
The old party stood for family values and something called open government. I’ve made repeated requests over the past two weeks or more to Banks’ Congressional and re-election offices as to how he voted on earmarks in November 2021. No response yet. Not even a “none of your business.” Which is what I take no response to mean.
Another digression: As I was doing my final tweaks to this column Friday afternoon, George Will’s column arrived in my email. I could not help but chuckle at one of his timely side-notes: “Affability can ruin a Republican’s reputation with the party’s surly base.”
As you are probably aware, Daniels has decided not to run. The state-level contributors to our Opinion page have ruminated on that sufficiently, his reasons being instructive as to the declining relevancy and effectiveness of Congress itself as well as the state of the “new” Republican Party — indeed, the state of our union. Last week on this page, one of our conservative national columnists reflected on how the “MAGA world attack” on Daniels should be an early “alarm bell” for the Republican Party. I will not re-hash their conclusions.
I have been an unabashed Daniels fan since his tenure, during which I was fortunate to have a number of one-on-one conversations. While not agreeing with everything he did, his record of actually accomplishing things in Indianapolis and at Purdue is remarkable. He was my write-in candidate in the past two presidential elections when I could not in good conscience vote for what our political parties determined to be their best candidates.
Meanwhile, I have become less and less a fan of Jim Banks. I believe Jim Banks is a good person, but he has become an even better politician. He knows which way the Indiana Republican wind blows and it blows towards the altar of Donald Trump.
Equally troubling is the trickle-down tendencies of this “new” Republican Party to the state and even our local levels, characterized for example by a) the state party’s nomination of a secretary of state candidate — who was subsequently elected — with whom comparisons can be made to the George Santos fiasco and b) those online references back in January that Bluffton shouldn’t be so inclusive, which would then mean it is desired to be exclusive. And without having “insider” information but rather as a citizen just paying attention, it appears that the “new” is making an effort to push out, or at least marginalize, the “old.”
If the 2022 mid-term election taught us anything, it is that the Republican Party needs to move on from 2020, which is an ironic thing to say about something tagged to be “new.”
That is part of the topsy-turvy world we live in, a world which may give us the same presidential choices in 2024 that we had in 2020. That would mean another write-in vote. Because I’m old.
miller@news-banner.com
