Reaction to the First Gubernatorial Debate

Well, if you played a drinking game with every mention of George W. Bush, the toll road, or Daylight Savings Time, you would be plenty tipsy right now. And it’s safe to say that Jill Long Thompson could give Nancy Pelosi a run for her money in a blink-off and Barack Obama a run for his in an uh-off. Even her references to the issue of the use of state planes were ham-handed, mangled, and ineffective.

The long and short of it is that this debate changed absolutely nothing. Jill Long Thompson landed no blows upon Mitch Daniels and she made no attacks on him that have not already been made–often more articulately–by Democrats over the past four years. Those failed arguments have left Mitch with a 15-20% lead in polling, and nothing that happened tonight will change that position.

Indeed, Mitch made convincing and persuasive arguments in favor of his policies and ideas, at least as much as he could given the time restrictions (which are at least more generous than those of his many paid television spots).

You had to love Mitch’s line in response to Jill Long Thompson of “so many falsehoods, and so little time.” She was a fountain of negativity in the debate, and continued to dredge up the past (slightly less focused on the past, Mitch entertainingly noted, than Andy Horning).

Perhaps the killer line of the debate was Mitch’s contention that we have seen all of Jill Long Thompson’s policies and ideas before; we have seen them in Indiana for the past sixteen years and we have seen them in our neighboring states. And we have seen that they do not work. They have caused Indiana to fall behind, a lag that we are only now, with four years of hard work and good government (sometimes bipartisan), starting to overcome. To go back to them now would be foolhardy.

The advantage, and the initiative, clearly and unquestionably remain with Mitch.