Adam Wren of Indianapolis Monthly writes for Politico:

John Kasich became the 16th person to join the GOP presidential race on Tuesday and, more to the point, the eighth governor or ex-governor to jump in, joining his fellow Midwesterner Scott Walker of Wisconsin and the Florida money magnet that is Jeb Bush, among others. But oddly enough, the dominant gubernatorial presence in the 2016 campaign for the White House may well be someone who’s not running and has no plans to.

His name is Mitch Daniels.

Call him Mitch the Mentor, or Mitch the Model, or what you will, but the self-effacing former Indiana governor and head of George W. Bush’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly admired and emulated by other Republican candidates, especially Midwestern GOP governors who have followed in his footsteps, like Kasich and Walker.  It’s not surprising: Daniels inherited a broken, stubborn state in 2004 and transformed it into what he once called “the peony in a parking lot” of Midwestern states—one with a $2 billion rainy day fund, an AAA credit rating and widespread recognition as having one of the best governors in the nation. In doing so, he left behind a veritable policy playbook for Kasich and Walker, among others.

And Daniels gets a lot of credit for leading the way, especially from Walker, who wrote in his 2013 campaign book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge, that after he was elected governor in 2010 his talks with Daniels “proved to be a critical turning point in my thinking about how to address the budget crisis in Madison.” Kasich, speaking at a Republican Governors Association meeting in Boca Raton last November, called Daniels the Michael Jordan of governors when he tried to size up the task incumbent Indiana Gov. Mike Pence faced in following his predecessor. And in a May interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Jeb Bush placed Daniels alongside himself as the nation’s two most successful governors.

In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Daniels attempted to downplay the breadth and depth of his influence. “I always used to say when somebody called and wanted to ask how we did this, ‘There’s no patents or copyrights in this business. Have at it.’ Of like-minded governors such as Bush, Kasich, Illinois’ Bruce Rauner, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, and Walker, Daniels said he admires all of them. “President Reagan always used to say there are two kinds of people in office: Those who ran to be something, and those who ran to do something. These are doers that you’ve mentioned, Walker clearly one.”

Walker and Kasich share similar gubernatorial records. Both attempted to repeal collective bargaining early in their tenures as part of their efforts to reform their state’s’ fiscal positions—homages to Daniels’ 2005 strategy, though Kasich was ultimately unsuccessful when Ohio voters rejected the concept at the ballot box in November 2011, dismissing the proposal by a 2-to-1 margin. Walker cut taxes by $2 billion; Kasich claims to have cut taxes by $5 billion.

But it is the Wisconsin governor who is more forthright in embracing Daniels as a model. Indeed, just two weeks after being elected as Wisconsin’s governor in 2010, Walker had what he later described as an eye-opening conversation with Daniels at the Republican Governors Association confab in San Diego. Coming into office, Walker faced a $137 million budget shortfall, and a $3.6 billion gap in the state’s biennial budget. When he began to consider eliminating collective bargaining—his trademark policy move—he didn’t first take the idea to his staff. He took it to Daniels, who had already quashed collective bargaining for state employees by executive order hours after taking office in 2005.

The two first met in 2008 at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. Walker, the former three-time Milwaukee County executive and failed one-time gubernatorial candidate, introduced Daniels to conventioneers as a fellow Harley-Davidson rider who cut property taxes and reformed Indiana’s government. Years later, Walker would seek Daniels’ advice, traveling to Indiana for a meeting with the governor before launching his second gubernatorial campaign.

It was in San Diego that the Daniels model really congealed for Walker. Daniels told Walker that eliminating collective bargaining for state employees not only saved Indiana taxpayers money, but also laid the groundwork for him to launch other reforms, from privatizing Indiana’s toll road to shaking up state agencies. He gave Walker three pieces of advice: “… go big, go bold, and strike fast”; “political capital is not something you spend, it’s something you invest—and properly invested, it brings a return”; and “never stop reforming.”

“The more I spoke with Mitch over the course of the weekend, the more I learned about how his reforms had worked, and the more confident I became that similar reforms could succeed in Wisconsin,” Walker wrote in Unintimidated. “Leaving that meeting in San Diego, I was ready to get rid of collective bargaining.”

Over nearly a dozen pages in his book, Walker name-checks Daniels nearly two dozen times. “Governor Walker has great respect for Mr. Daniels and considers him a friend,” said Laurel Patrick, Walker’s press secretary, in an email. “He admires the work Daniels accomplished during his time as Governor and his record of being a true economic reformer.”

While Walker did what Kasich couldn’t when it came to repealing collective bargaining, Kasich, too, emulated Daniels in Ohio, inheriting an 89-cent rainy day fund and topping it off recently at $1 billion. In his 44-minute announcement speech in Columbus, Kasich also appealed to moderates and economically struggling voters in the same way that Daniels urged in his February 2011 CPAC speech. “We must display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on the first rung of life’s ladder,” Daniels said in a speech that has become a kind of ur-text for Daniels supporters. “Upward mobility from the bottom is the crux of the American promise, and the stagnation of the middle class is in fact becoming a problem, on any fair reading of the facts.”

A Kasich spokesman declined to comment on the Ohio governor’s similarities with Daniels, though admitting he admired his record.

In interviews, former aides to the Indiana governor say they see a lot of Daniels in Walker (and to a lesser extent, Kasich). Walker’s personal and public parsimony. His bold reformer swagger. Even his Harley-Davidson-on the-hustings approach to retail politics. “Gov. Daniels had principles that he chose to lead by and govern through, and Walker has been closest in emulating that,” said Betsy Wiley, Daniels’ former deputy chief of staff.

Daniels, the former political adviser to Ronald Reagan—the plumb line of Republican politics—has himself molded a new generation of Republican governors and 2016 candidates.

Daniels, the 2012 cycle’s will-he-or-won’t-he presidential candidate, is also serving as a model to a crop of up-and-coming Midwestern governors attempting to follow in his footsteps. And he’s doing so not through back-channel conversations, endorsements or maneuvers, but by the sheer force of his ideas and record of governance.

Daniels authored a “new kind of modern, upper-Midwest, thrifty, practical, good-neighborly kind of government,” says American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, a Daniels acolyte. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, 20 years from now, the salient Republican brand is the upper-Midwest Republican.”

Brooks, author of The Conservative Heart, places Kasich, Walker and Bush as adherents to this brand of governance. “He’s this funny amalgam of skepticism of what the government should do, but optimism about what the government can do,” Brooks says of Daniels.

Thus the governors sitting out 2016—including Michigan’s Snyder and Illinois’ Rauner— also routinely hold up Daniels’ bold governance template as one that they’re trying to copy. Snyder spent hours with Daniels in Indianapolis during the summer of 2009 before mounting his gubernatorial bid. “He was very kind to meet with me,” says Snyder, who wanted to benchmark the work the nation’s best governors were doing to reform their states. “Mitch Daniels popped to the top of the list. He allowed me to come down and talk with him and learn from him.” (Snyder says he also cribbed Daniels’ idea of campaigning across the state in an RV, encouraging supporters to sign it at events along the way.) Rauner poached two former Daniels’ staffers, David Wu, Rauner’s director of government transformation and a policy director for Daniels, and Jason Barclay, Rauner’s general counsel and Daniels’ legal counsel.

Cam Savage, former communications director for Daniels’ 2008 reelection bid and principal of the consultancy Limestone Strategies, says when he meets with state and federal candidates from across the country, they still want to talk about Daniels. “Big change is hard; Mitch always said that,” Savage says. “He laid out a good model to follow, and that’s why people are following it.”

So why isn’t Daniels running? Apparently his wife doesn’t want him to run, and he therefore wasn’t interested in running in 2012 and isn’t interested in running in 2016.

So who is the Mitch of 2016? And which of the 16 announced candidates hews closest to his model of governance? While Walker may have emulated Daniels’ Indiana tenure most during his time in Wisconsin, Daniels’ aides say they see a bit of their former principal in several GOP candidates. There is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who also spent time with Daniels in Indianapolis and regularly talks up the do-or-die fiscal issues so close to Daniels’ heart. There is Kasich, the budget hawk who appears poised to appeal to the “yet-to-haves” and moderates Daniels so often targeted and also is well-positioned to tell the tale of Ohio’s economic and fiscal comeback. And there is Bush, whose good-governance approach in Florida mirrored—and overlapped—Daniels’ tenure in Indiana. …

If they’re happy to be aligned with Daniels’ fiscal and economic record, none of the 2016 Republican candidates has yet leapt to embrace his social truce (Walker, in particular, seems positioned to run right of a hypothetical Daniels candidacy). In Indiana, the wisdom of Daniels’ truce seemed to be reinforced by the recent uproar spurred by his successor Pence’s decision to sign a so-called religious freedom law, infuriating Indiana’s business community. Along with social conservatives, that constituency constituted one wing of a fragile coalition that Daniels managed to keep together during his eight years in office. In fact, the blowback was so severe that Bill Oesterle, the former CEO of Angie’s List and Daniels’ former campaign manager, stepped down recently to become more involved in politics, encouraging Daniels to challenge Pence in a 2016 primary, a move that doesn’t seem to have gained traction with Daniels. In his latest “Crystal Ball,” Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, wrote: “The controversy probably will fade in importance over time, but it’s clear that Pence lacks the magic touch of his popular predecessor, former Gov. Mitch Daniels …”

Daniels declined to comment directly on his successor’s approach. “The rule that always made sense to me is big change requires big majorities,” Daniels says. “Jamming something through unread, unexplained, on a pure partisan basis—I won’t name any examples—is probably not a formula for either success or for consensus support.”

That last point is a Walker weakness. I’ve argued here before that Walker is in no way a libertarian, which is an issue only for conservatarians like myself. Walker won the 2010 and 2014 elections because he got his base out, including the state’s silent majority voters — those who don’t put up yard signs or bumper stickers, but usually vote for conservative candidates. Walker won in 2012 for that reason and the added reason that even some who opposed Act 10 nonetheless disapproved of recalling a politician for policies with which they disagreed.

One interesting omission in this piece is one of the other Republican (former) governors — Texas’ Rick Perry. One might conclude that Perry didn’t have to do much in government reform (or perhaps could not, given Texas’ political structure that gives its lieutenant governor an unusual amount of power), certainly given the fact that Texas had more job growth than the entire rest of the country during the Great Recession.

If you think about it, Daniels was the perfect candidate for what the tea party was supposed to be about — fiscal and economic conservatism. It’s been noted elsewhere that there is no conflict between the Wisconsin Republican Party and the tea party, but the tea party wasn’t supposed to include social issues such as the recently signed 20-week abortion ban.

Walker will probably contend for the GOP nomination most of the primary season (which has, yes, an entire year to go yet), in part due to his appeal to social conservatives. His appeal to non-conservatives in a presidential election has yet to be seen.