The Outstater
Mike Braun: The Expectations
LOOKING OVER Governor-elect Mike Braun’s transition team and governing plan and you get a is-everyone-happy-with-the-state-flower vibe. There’s nothing impressive there yet, especially considering that the Republicans have had a super-majority for more than a dozen years now. We appear to have elected a team of accountants. We had hoped for astronauts.
The governor will be taking a deep dive into the abstruse fiscals of public-school administration, healthcare formulas, property taxes, the sort of stuff a capable bookkeeper could handle. But apparently outside the Braun viewfinder are dozens of innovative programs put in place by other states. Many of these would make Indiana more competitive, more attractive to investment. They are detailed in the most recent edition of “Indiana Mandate.”
The Braun team is made up of the usual GOP suspects, some blessed with the evocation “Mitch Daniels” to give them an aura of competence. There is Mike Pence’s commerce secretary, Braun’s Senate chief of staff, a couple of former GOP state chairmen, an activist pro-life lawyer, the Daniels deputy press secretary and a grab bag of other Daniels hangers-ons.
They do not strike me as a bold or innovative bunch. I hope I’m wrong but the Statehouse talent pool does not look deep. The Pence administration was a black hole (can you spell Eric Holcomb). And Daniels was a one-man show with a run-of-the-mill staff working in a decidedly volatile political environment. Braun, by contrast, will head a long-unified state government, with the power and authority to lead Indiana anywhere he might decide, should he decide.
On the policy side, Braun says he will expand the school voucher program, an issue that has been kicked around for three decades now. But he says nothing about education tax credits, which would truly free Indiana parents to pick the right school for their children. And no details yet about election integrity, illegal immigration or restoring state universities to something approaching sane governance. We especially would have liked to have heard some kind words about the sanctity — and fragility — of private property and how it relates to general prosperity. How about urban crime and the breakdown of common law?
Most concerning is a casual approach to economic development. Braun does not seem to recognize that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) is a fraud, an exercise in press-release economics, a sprawling scheme to leverage public funds for the gain of politically favored clients. Nor does he see how it skews local politics. Rather, Braun may assume it merely needs his expert touch, a tweak here, a tweak there.
“There’s going to be a lot of transparency associated with the IEDC,” he told State Affairs. “I think that’s maybe where they got into a little bit of trouble with LEAP (Lebanon Innovation District(, for instance, because that was so different. There were several cases where the cart may have been in front of the horse.”
Braun talks about “fertilizing” small businesses and keeping the state economy “humming.” No, what we need is for him to get government out of the way, to assign his team of gimlet-eyed amanuenses the job of scouring regulations, taxes and laws with the single purpose of freeing commerce and industry to do their thing. He ran a business, he must know the hobbles and snares well enough.
But leading a state politically is another matter. To summarize, this week’s naming of a transition team has left unclear whether Braun realizes that true reform, real progress, will require systemic change — not just reforming an ill-conceived department but eliminating it, not fiddling around with teacher salaries but tossing out the Indiana Collective Bargaining Act. And does the governorship still have a cabinet-level director of diversity, equity and inclusion? Or, for that matter, a department of education? The Republicans have the votes to fix all that but not the discipline.
Today if you look up Indiana on almost any economic scale it is always in the middle — that is, middling, not too bad, not too good, can’t complain. Some take a perverse pride in that. I don’t. Within my lifetime Florida was a backwater, Arizona was desolate, Texas was just truck stops. I think Indiana, too, can be exceptional, not in attracting experts and sophisticates from elsewhere but in allowing those already here to innovate and prosper.
We’ve done it before. I live in Fort Wayne, whose record of inventions and productivity is unrivaled by even Silicon Valley. Military victories there against the French and their Indian allies opened the Northwest to settlement. Other Indiana cities have similar historical achievements. Read our Andrea Neal’s wonderful, “Road Trip: A Pocket History of Indiana.”
I think Braun shares that pioneer spirit and vision of excellence. But again, I worry that he underestimates the difficulties that politics poses even at the state level, that unintended consequences are rarely corrected, that opportunity costs are never tallied, that legislative allies are undependable, that promises are broken — all with impunity. He will need a strong staff and a strong party behind him, and I have my doubts he has it.
All of that said, Mike Braun is a good man, a smart man. We wish him well in a most difficult job. Indiana is at a moment of historic opportunity. We need him to succeed. — tcl
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