He was in Iowa last year, and will speak at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in April.

Now, he’s going to New Hampshire.

From the Indy Star:

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, who has left the door open to running for president in 2012, is heading to New Hampshire next month as the keynote speaker for a GOP fundraising dinner.

It will be the Indiana Republican’s first trip to New Hampshire, the state that typically holds the first presidential primary.

“We feel that he’s somebody in politics who is an up-and-coming voice for the Republican Party,” said Steve Stepanek, chairman of the Hillsborough County Republican Committee, which is holding the dinner. “We want to make sure we give our constituents and members of our party the opportunity to meet and converse with all of the important candidates who are coming to New Hampshire.”

Pence, the third-ranking member of the House GOP leadership, has said he is focused for now on helping Republicans in the 2010 elections and will consider other possibilities after that.

Ambinder (taking a break from his usual furious spinning in defense of Obama):

Pence Has Presidential Race On His Mind

The surest sign yet that Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) wants to make the leap from prominent back-bencher to presidential contender? He’s agreed to speak at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in April. Ostensibly a forum for top Republicans, everyone who goes there, from journalists to party activists, knows that it is a presidential convention of sorts. There’s a straw poll, there are private donor events, a chance to compare candidates. The inclusion of Pence — on the periphery of 2012 speculation — means that the SRLC, held in New Orleans, is more than just your average cattle call. If Sen. John Thune, everyone’s favorite dark horse, decides to go, then the attention given to the SRLC will ratchet up by several orders of magnitude. Already, several cable channels are inquiring about how to broadcast live from the event.

I would say that if you’re the #3 Republican in the House of Representatives, you’re something more than a “prominent back-bencher.” And if the Republicans do well this coming November, he’ll be more still.

And this particular Hoosier getting presidential buzz hasn’t raised taxes, has great speaking ability, and appeals to the Tea Party movement because he (as one told me recently) “gets it.”

Oh, and he’s tall and has a full head of hair, too. Just saying. It can’t hurt, right?

I’m sure some people won’t agree with all of these, but disagreeing is what these lists are for anyway. Just posting it like I see it.

Winners

Conservatives – If you had written one of these lists at the start of 2009, you would almost certainly have not predicted that conservatives (or Republicans, for that matter) would be looking ahead with hope to the 2010 elections. You also probably wouldn’t have predicted that public opinion on everything from health care to the generic Congressional ballot to deficits to the very role of government in our lives would now be tilted in favor of conservatives (and, to a lesser extent, Republicans).

Mitch Daniels – Despite his local government reform agenda stalling in the House during the legislative session, the Governor rolled over Pat Bauer in the budget fight. He went down to the wire to protect the state’s reserves. Those reserves are now going to be used to save the state from even deeper cuts in education and other services. Had the reserves been spent, as Bauer and the Democrats wanted, the cuts Indiana is looking at in 2010 would be even deeper. Did I mention that he’s getting a lot of presidential buzz for 2012 and his national profile has increased?

Richard Mourdock – You couldn’t have predicted the rise of Richard Mourdock at the start of 2009. The normally-quiet state treasurer from Indiana went to the Supreme Court to try and stop the Obama administration from seizing Chrysler and screwing Indiana pensioners out of millions. In the process, Mourdock has found his voice and has become a hero to the Tea Party movement. Provided he weathers the vengeance of Obama and his minions in 2010, Mourdock’s future for 2012 could be bright indeed.

Dan Burton – That Dan Burton would face a primary challenge again in 2010 could have been predicted. What could not have been so easily predicted was that he would face so many opponents that the “anti-Burton vote” would be so split as to make his primary victory (and thus reelection) almost certain.

(Read more after the leap)

Agree or Disagree with the President past or present, you don’t compare a past or present President to a “Crack Head trying to get his fix” President Obama fire Van Jones and have some class!!!

Update to this post…Van Jones has resigned from his position as the Green Czar! From Breitbart:

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama’s adviser Van Jones has resigned amid controversy over past inflammatory statements, the White House said early Sunday.Jones, an administration official specializing in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality was linked to efforts suggesting a government role in the 2001 terror attacks and to derogatory comments about Republicans.

Mitch Daniels is going to be on This Week with George Stephanopoulos this Sunday morning.

This is obviously no indication of any presidential aspiration because, of course, all of this constant high-profile national stuff is just something he did routinely in his first four years in office.

Oh wait, it wasn’t.

Jim Shella asks why Mitch Daniels is still updating his gubernatorial campaign website:

With all the speculation about Mitch Daniels place in the GOP, the encouragement for him to run for President, and his stated desire to return to private life after 2012, here’s a question: Why does the governor maintain a political website?

mymanmitch.com is up to date with video of speeches, news accounts, lists of accomplishments.. and .. a place to donate money.

It could be that Daniels needs the money to help out other candidates and not himself, maybe candidates for the Indiana House in 2010. He has a huge interest in the battle for control there.

But, could he be leaving a door open?

That’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is not Mitch’s gubernatorial website, but this website, Americans for Mitch.

If it looks familiar, it should. It’s registered by Mike O’Brien, one of the people behind the blog Frugal Hoosiers (which, before it was a blog, was a website that ran an effort to “draft” Mitch Daniels in 2003 to run for governor of Indiana).

The “About Us” page pretty much lays it all out there:

(Read more after the leap)

Meet Mike Murphy. He’s a political consultant. He was a campaign strategist and pollster for Mitt Romney and John McCain. He hated the pick of Sarah Palin as vice president.

He’s now a talking head on MSNBC. He likes to write columns proclaiming doom and gloom and the end of the Republican Party unless it runs more people like John McCain. Funny how that worked out this last time, right?

He’s also an idiot.

In his latest column, Murphy singles out Indiana to prove his hypothesis of the need for more candidates like John McCain:

(Read more after the leap)

Another stop on his visit to Washington, it seems (thank you again, Google Alerts), was to speak to the Board of Directors of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Read more about Mitch’s remarks to the Chamber board here.

The Governor is going to DC so often that it’s hard to keep track of his comings and goings; fortunately Google Alerts keeps a good tab on everything Mitch:

IN Gov. Mitch Daniels addressed Ripon Society on June 10.

It appears that the Governor has also been on the cover of The Ripon Forum, the journal of the Ripon Society, a Republican group dedicated to “inclusion and reform” and a “moderate course.”

The text of their cover article about Mitch Daniels is available here.

You can read more about the Ripon Society at their website here. The Society was established in 1962 and has an interesting history detailed at that link.

I assume that there will be video or a transcript of Mitch’s remarks at some point (previous remarks can be watched at Ripon’s website). I’ll post when / if they make it available.

Mitch never limits himself to one thing in his weekly sojourns to the District. Last time, it was C-SPAN and the Hudson Institute. This time, it’s the Ripon Society (which probably can’t be the only thing he’s doing while in Washington, so there’s probably another media appearance or speech coming up soon; keep an eye out).

Wednesday, Mitch Daniels seemed to end any speculation about possible presidential aspirations.

Or did he? If you were to carefully read what Mitch said, you’d find his usual remarks about not being a career politician more than you’d find a definitive disavowal of presidential aspirations. You find the same sort of disinterest in running for president that Mitch showed in running for governor before 2004.

A Sherman statement, Mitch’s comments Wednesday were not, and Mitch is someone that chooses his words carefully whenever he speaks.

But there are several other reasons to not view Mitch’s remarks yesterday as definitive.

(Read more after the leap)

Mitch Daniels doesn’t stand still for long.

On Monday, he outlined his ideas for a new state budget.

On Tuesday, he set a date for the special session to hammer out that budget.

On Wednesday, he was in Washington D.C. speaking about his ideas for a revival of the Republican Party.

Among them was a return to empathy, you might call it Compassionate Conservatism 2.0:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said Wednesday that his fellow Republicans need to work harder to show “empathy” if they want to emerge from the political doldrums.

Daniels also called those on the left of the political spectrum “the meanest people in politics.”

Conservatives have lampooned President Barack Obama for using “empathy” to describe one of the qualities he seeks in a potential Supreme Court justice. But Daniels said “empathy” is spot on — Obama’s just misappropriated the word.

“Empathy is going to get a bad name for a little while because it’s been transported into the world of the rule of law,” Daniels told a forum for conservatives. “It’s what distinguishes us from other species.”

Republicans, he said, “must not only assert but assert with credibility that we understand what’s going on in the lives of everyday people.”

Daniels spoke at “Making Conservatism Credible Again,” a forum hosted by the Hudson Institute and the Bradley Foundation. Daniels used to work at the Hudson Institute.

The second-term governor said conservatives would have to bide their time but that push-back on Obama and Democratic leadership is coming. In the meantime, the governor said, conservatives needed to practice humility.

“We don’t have to believe we have all the answers,” he said.

Still, Daniels said he saw reason to be optimistic. Many voters motivated by the historic nature of Obama’s campaign cast their ballots as a sort of “fashion statement,” he said, and will come to regret their decision when Obama’s policies are enacted.

Conservatives can use their time out of power to distinguish themselves from their opponents’ time in the wilderness, Daniels said.

“We need to accept the role of the loyal opposition much more gracefully than our opponents did,” he said. “If you haven’t noticed, the meanest people in politics are on the American left. We must be a friendly movement.”

I heartily agree with the need to be happy warriors in the opposition, rather than become mindlessly enraged as the Democrats and the left did with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Mitch also slammed the Obama administration’s policies as “shock and awe statism,” a very fitting term:

Now that President Obama isn’t hawking casinos on TV (oh wait … that WASN’T him? shucks. Whoever did his voice over did an impressive job), let’s get back to the task at hand. I did a slight cringe on Friday when he made his remarks concerning the economy, watching the Dow seeing if it would fall again as on many other days when POTUS #44 would speak on the economy. Amazingly enough, it didn’t fall after the remarks were made.

Today, Rasmussen published this chart corresponding to this poll. Seems the “approves” and “disapproves” are merging ever so closer together.

March 16 2009 Approval Poll

The following is purely tongue-in-cheek, so if you’re a Dem with no sense of humor (which includes most of you)  don’t read any further:

The President could do an Entertainment Stimulus, as the casino ad on TV stated. He’ll give every adult over the age of 21 a certain amount of money with directions to the nearest casino. The people would go to casinoes and try their luck at “increasing their economic stimulus”. The State would make money from the gambling taxes and admission fees to the casinoes. It’s a win-win!