Cockeyed Platonist (CP) makes a bold statement in his latest column in The New York Times, a U.S. Government subsidiary. It deserves a full quotation:

‘Daniels’s Conservative Political Action Conference speech had a serious and weighty tone. He spoke for those who believe the country’s runaway debt is the central moral challenge of our time. Yet within government’s proper sphere of action, he said Republicans have to be the “initiators of new ideas.” He spoke of the program he started that provides health insurance for low-income residents, and the education program that will give scholarships to students in failing schools so they can choose another.’

The ‘central moral challenge of our time’, from the standpoint of Conservatism, might just be the failure of the Free Market Theology in 2008 and the collapse of our collective economic well being since that time. That kind of honesty would come from a place of political probity and plain speaking; but those two concepts don’t win elections: whereas the current scapegoating of the Neo-Keynesian economic policies of President Obama, combined with the Public Sector Unions as target of the wrath of the full spectrum of Conservative activism, might just change the subject, a favorite Conservative ploy.

Just in time to save Conservatism from certain defeat in The American Political Melodrama comes Governor Mitch Daniels: a former employee of President Reagan with that same penchant for faux awe shucks political candor, of a sort, an appetite for union busting and bearer of the banner of ‘Austerity.’ Now the ‘Austerity’ that Governor Daniels advocates is not for corporate citizens but only for the under one hundred thousand dollar a year people, who really pay the freight. CP loves a politician with a patina of populism without its pesky baggage, and Governor Daniels has lots of statistical data to back up his new politics. CP is lost in the state of a smitten teenager, a platonic political romance is born and takes shape before our astonished eyes.