That’s the shorthand Mitch Daniels uses for Americans aspiring to the middle class: the yet-to-haves. During a press breakfast in Washington, the Indiana-governor-turned-college-president said this is the class of people lawmakers on both sides of the aisle ought to come together to serve.
Sounds like a good idea. Especially for Republicans still recovering from the shellacking their candidate took in last year’s presidential election. Because the main reason Mitt Romney failed was not that he had bad policies. The main reason he failed is that he did not connect his policies with the aspirations of the American people.
Exit polls underscored the main thing that kept him out of the Oval Office: Only one out of five Americans agreed that Romney “cares about people like me.”
That’s where Daniels’ formula might help. When Daniels became governor in 2005, Indiana was in bad shape. He turned his state around. He did it by taming the public sector, opening up the economy, reforming property taxes and so on.
Equally important, Daniels worked hard to sell his message. He succeeded in large part because he presented his policies in ways that spoke to values and yearnings of Indiana’s citizens. In other words, he tethered his platform to the whole promise of America: that with hard work and a fair shake, there is no limit to what people can accomplish for themselves and their families.
Daniels recognizes that sometimes need the help of their government, through no fault of their own. But the more important part is how he regards the poor: not as helpless wards who will be forever dependent on the state, but as yet-to-haves who will move into the middle class and realize their dreams so long as we get out of their way and let them take advantage of an economy creating new jobs and new opportunities every day.
Today Daniels is president of Purdue University, where he is surrounded by young people who are just starting out in life. He believes the greatest threat to their dreams is the anemic economic growth rate we’ve had these past few years. If we don’t get this economy moving, he says, they won’t find opportunities — and we will “destroy the sense of upward mobility or sense of cohesiveness that we’ve always been blessed with.”
That’s the beauty of the yet-to-haves language: it puts the emphasis on upward mobility. Republicans please take note.