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Welcome home, Mitch
by David Hoppe May 14, 2003
White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels’ decision to return home to Indiana has the state’s Republican leadership dancing in the hallways of the Columbia Club, so certain are they that Mitch is the man to win them the governor’s seat in the next election. Daniels has not declared himself a candidate yet. Instead, he has invoked his Hoosier roots as the reason for his leaving Washington, D.C. “It’s just time to come home,” he is quoted as saying. Such plainspoken sentiment might have come from the mouth of Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra film. Movies can, in fact, play such a large role in defining our sense of place it’s interesting to imagine what films come to Mitch Daniels’ mind when he daydreams about coming home to Indiana. I wonder what he’d make, for instance, of the crop duster scene in Hitchcock’s classic thriller, North By Northwest. One of the most unforgettable sequences in motion picture history, the crop duster scene is set on a desolate stretch of Highway 41, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis. Cary Grant, our hero, has been directed to this spot in order to meet a mystery man named Kaplan. Thus he climbs down from a Greyhound bus and finds himself standing in one of the most effective evocations of the phrase “middle of nowhere” ever put on film. Flat, brown, freeze-dried looking fields stretch out in all directions but one — where we see the husky remains of a played-out cornfield. Grant stands there in his pearl grey suit, the model of urbanity in a perfectly inhospitable environment. When another man is dropped off across the road, Grant, thinking this could be his rendezvous, approaches him. “Hot day,” he says. The other man replies in laconic Hoosier: “Seen worse.” Grant quickly realizes this isn’t Kaplan. The man looks up in the sky. “Funny,” he says, noting a biplane in the distance, “dustin’ crops when there ain’t no crops.” Then his bus arrives. Grant is alone again. The most famous part of the sequence begins at this point. The plane has been sent to kill Grant. It tries to run him down. When he flees into the cornfield, it douses him with DDT. Desperate, Grant tries to flag a passing tanker truck, which, at once, knocks him down and is hit by the low-flying plane, which explodes in a ball of fire. Grant steals a passerby’s pickup truck and makes his getaway. You can have your Hoosiers and your Breaking Away. No one has ever evoked the loneliness of a certain kind of Indiana landscape the way Hitchcock does here. Given the state of Indiana’s economy — its $810 million deficit, record-breaking rate of home foreclosure and “brain drain” — it’s a fitting image for the “home” that Mitch Daniels returns to. What’s puzzling is why so many Indiana Republicans see this homecoming as something to celebrate. Until now, they could lay the state’s economic woes on the doorstep of whichever Democrat has the dubious fortune of taking the gubernatorial mantle from the sadly sloping shoulders of Frank O’Bannon. But Daniels allows them to shift the focus. He has not only presided over a return to record-breaking federal deficits, he has been one of the architects of the Bush Administration’s withdrawal of support for human services from cash-strapped states. Bush, who likes giving pet names to his colleagues, calls Daniels “The Blade” for the zest he’s brought to domestic budget cutting. What’s more, Daniels has been subpoenaed by state regulators in connection with his cashing in of $1.45 million in IPALCO stock just prior to that company’s sale to American Electric Systems in early 2001. Daniels was a member of IPALCO’s board of directors. Several of these so-called insiders got rid of their stock before the sale was completed. After the merger the stock price dropped from $49.60 in March 2001 to 92 cents in October, leaving stockholders holding the bag. In what’s being called “Indiana’s Enron,” 2,000 IPALCO employees have filed a suit in U.S. District Court alleging that insiders “dumped” $71 million worth of stock, getting out while the getting was good. Based on this resume, it’s hard to see how Republicans can look at Daniels and insist on seeing Cary Grant when Montgomery Burns is staring everyone else in the face. But all the things that would seem to make Daniels a liability are, from a Republican perspective, probably assets. Governors, it’s been said, are the political executives most able to effect change. That’s why so many of them wind up in the White House. As governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels will be able to turn this state into a kind of conservative laboratory. A place where public pension funds are privatized, taxes on corporations and the wealthy relaxed, where social services are delivered by philanthropies and religious institutions, schools paid for with vouchers and environmental problems addressed by market-driven solutions. If this litany sounds like good times to you, then, like a lot of this state’s Republicans, you can be glad Mitch Daniels is coming home. I hope you’ll forgive the rest of us for feeling a little like Cary Grant, stranded out there on Highway 41, wondering what a plane would be doing dusting crops where there ain’t none.
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