Mitch Daniels, the conservative intelligentsia’s choice for president in 2012, came to Washington on Wednesday to give a speech on education policy to a conservative think tank. But not 10 minutes into his address, he took an unexpected turn. 
 
 “Most of what I’ve talked about so far, and much of what I will, is strongly supported by the Obama administration,” the Republican governor of Indiana told the standing-room-only crowd at the American Enterprise Institute. “I salute the president, Secretary [Arne] Duncan. They are right about these things.” 
 
 Dana Milbank writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined the Post as a political reporter in 2000. View Archive 
 
 Off-message alert! One of the right-minded thinkers in the room rose to give Daniels a second chance to criticize Obama. The governor declined. “I really do want to salute and commend — and I’ve done it over and over — the president, Secretary Duncan, for a lot of leadership in this area,” he affirmed. “There is a federal role” in education, he argued. “I believe in national standards.” 
 
 It may sound jarring these days to hear any conservative say anything nice about the Obama administration; Daniels also cheered the president’s “well-done, well-handled” dispatching of Osama bin Laden. 
 
 But the Indiana governor is following a well-written playbook. A dozen years ago, George W. Bush (for whom Daniels later worked as White House budget director) campaigned for the GOP presidential nomination as a different kind of Republican, a “compassionate conservative” motivated principally by concern for poor black kids and public schools. 
 
 In the end, most of that turned out to be hooey; Bush was very much a conventional conservative. Daniels, likewise, is no bleeding heart — but he is demonstrating himself to be a shrewd tactician. At a time when Republican voters are disenchanted with their presidential choices, and the existing candidates are marginalizing themselves by campaigning on abortion, homosexuality and birth certificates, not-yet-candidate Daniels looks like a grown-up. 
 
 Daniels isn’t nearly as natural a politician as Bush (he’s about 5-foot-4, with a comb-over), and he’s much more of an intellectual (his yawn-inducing talk explored “administrative flexibility” and “state assessment tests”). Surely, some of his wonkish appeal would wear off once opponents began to portray him as the old drug-industry executive he is. 
 
 But so far, the governor is doing well differentiating himself from the Republican field — and in the process portraying himself to moderates as a non-threatening choice. 
 
 Daniels, in the AEI speech, said teacher ratings would be based on the question “Did the children grow?” — an echo of Bush’s famous question “Is our children learning?” Like Bush, Daniels spoke of the need to help “the kids from the most vulnerable homes.” 
 
 In a rebuke of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), Daniels told the audience that “collective bargaining has its place, always will.” He spoke of “social justice” — a verboten phrase among some conservatives — and he softened his support for private-school vouchers by arguing that children must have two semesters in public school to be eligible. 
 
 Daniels boasted that he increased education spending in Indiana as part of his plan for extending full-day kindergarten to all 5-year-olds. “Indiana is number one in America in share of the state budget committed to education,” he claimed. 
 
 Democrats and teacher unions, of course, would beg to differ with Daniels’s characterization of his policies. But the presentation to the conservative elite was more about packaging: He is the disarming alternative to the GOP’s frightful field. 
 
 He began with corny humor (“first thing y’all need to know is you are here under false pretenses: I just came for a meal”) and segued into self-deprecation (“I do what lazy men do and show you a slide show”). He baffled the crowd with a one-liner about the recently deceased inventor of the teleprompter. He told a borscht-belt joke about “Billy,” who wouldn’t get up for school until his mother reminded him, “You’re the principal.” He employed folksy phrases such as “the bee that got in my bonnet,” and he attempted an education metaphor using a high-jump style known as the “Fosbury Flop.” 
 
 The aw-shucks routine also helped Daniels deflect a question from NPR’s Mara Liasson about whether he could still enter the presidential race at this late stage. “The man said, ‘When I considers my opportunities I marvels at my self-restraint,’ ” he quipped, before calling it a “happy surprise” that the race has yet to take shape. “Unless you’re a political professional or running a bed-and-breakfast in New Hampshire, it’s a darn good thing,” Daniels said. 
 
 So funny, so folksy, and so friendly to the disadvantaged: It is eerily similar to how another Republican governor presented himself to America a dozen springs ago. ||||| Let us stop for a minute to consider Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana. 
 
 Bet you didn’t see that one coming. 
 
 Many of you may be unacquainted with Daniels. After all, a lot of Americans go for years on end without ever setting foot in Indiana even though it is a fine state, full of lovely people and some first-class universities, not to mention the RV Hall of Fame, the world’s largest ball of paint and the Dan Quayle museum. 
 
 But about Mitch Daniels. The political world has been abuzz with speculation that he will run for president. Centrist Republicans loved it when he began urging the party to keep its eye on the deficit-reduction prize and stop obsessing about social issues. “Try to concentrate on making ends meet, which Washington obviously has failed to do for a long time, and have other policy debates in other places if you can,” he advised. 
 
 He then went home and announced that he would sign a bill to strip Planned Parenthood of Medicaid financing. 
 
 “He called a truce on social issues, and he was the first to fold,” said Nancy Keenan of NARAL Pro-Choice America. 
 
 “The suggestion I made about trying to set aside other issues was made in the national context,” Daniels said over a lunch with journalists this week in New York. “I was thinking more broadly than some people heard it.” 
 
 Actually, Daniels’s moderate fans thought abortion was precisely the issue he was calling on Republicans to set aside. Right now, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives can barely talk about anything else. State legislatures are flooded with bills to create “Choose Life” license plates, require women seeking abortions to look at sonograms of the fetus or make it harder for insurance companies to offer policies that cover abortions. 
 
 At one point during an interminable debate on an anti-abortion bill in Florida, the Democrats had an embarrassing squabble between two members that ended when Representative Scott Randolph of Orlando threw his opponent’s commemorative House pen in the trash. He is the same legislator who was privately admonished by the Republican House leadership for saying the word “uterus.” 
 
 Florida is a wreck. This is not something I would normally recommend, but maybe they should all get together and work on naming an official state gun. 
 
 The bill Daniels says he is going to sign in Indiana is a compilation of the anti-abortion movement’s greatest hits. It will make it impossible for Medicaid recipients to make use of the 28 Planned Parenthood clinics in the state and bans abortions for pregnancies that have reached 20 weeks. 
 
 Also, doctors would be required to tell women seeking abortions that “medical evidence shows that a fetus can feel pain at or before 20 weeks,” that human life begins when the egg is fertilized and that having an abortion could cause infertility. 
 
 “Pregnant women in the past might not have been provided with all the information,” Daniels said. 
 
 Possibly because all that information is questionable, theological or totally wrong. 
 
 While Daniels is not a good example of a fiscal conservative who wants to move beyond the social wars, he is a real prototype of the peculiar strain in the political right that trusts people to make their own informed decisions without government intervention except when it comes to the most exquisitely personal choice a woman could ever face. 
 
 In Washington, the new Republican majority’s very first bill of the year, H.R. 1, eliminated both financing for Planned Parenthood and financing for the groundbreaking database of public safety complaints that the Consumer Product Safety Commission was about to put online. The database, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas warned, “will drive jobs overseas.” 
 
 Legislatures in states that tend to be less than obsessive about consumers’ right to know are competing to find more things to require that doctors tell or show their patients before they can get abortions. In South Dakota, women have to be told that abortion ends “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” A court tossed out another section that required doctors to say that the procedure leads to an increased risk of suicide. 
 
 In his capacity as deficit hawk, Daniels waxes eloquent on his conviction that if Americans have to pay more of their medical bills, they’ll make smart choices about whether that nagging headache really requires the expense of a CAT scan. Doubting that the individual patient can judge whether more tests or medical procedures are required, Daniels said, “demeans the dignity of people.” 
 
 However, women who are seeking an abortion have to be given not only the information they ask for, or the information the doctor thinks they need, but also faux facts that their local lawmakers want to force on them. And dignity be damned.
– Two different views today on Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as a potential presidential candidate: Dana Milbank, Washington Post: He praises Daniels as a "shrewd tactician" who is wisely "portraying himself to moderates as a non-threatening choice" and as the "grown-up in the room" who avoids fringe issues. He's got aw-shucks charm to him and even dares to praise the Obama administration when he sees fit. "So funny, so folksy, and so friendly to the disadvantaged: It is eerily similar to how another Republican governor presented himself to America a dozen springs ago." Gail Collins, New York Times: Forgive her for falling out of her chair. Sure, Daniels famously called for a "truce" on social issues, but he's about to sign into law a bill that "is a compilation of the anti-abortion movement’s greatest hits." Among other things, it strips Planned Parenthood of Medicaid funds and requires doctors to give women information that is "questionable, theological or totally wrong." Daniels "is a real prototype of the peculiar strain in the political right that trusts people to make their own informed decisions without government intervention except when it comes to the most exquisitely personal choice a woman could ever face."