By Munir K. Nasser
Chief Correspondent, Washington, DC
Albawaba.com
President elect George W. Bush has selected Mitchell E. Daniels, the second Arab American for a cabinet-level position, to head the Office of Management and Budget in the new administration.
Bush on Tuesday named Spencer Abraham, an Arab American who recently lost a re-election bid for his Senate seat from Michigan, to be his Secretary of Energy.
Daniels, who serves now as senior vice-president at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, has been slated for the post of Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In this capacity he will oversee the preparation of the federal budget and its administration by all agencies of the executive branch.
Before joining Eli Lilly, Daniels served as President Ronald Reagan’s chief political advisor and as the Reagan Administration’s liaison to the nation’s state and local officials from 1985-87. In 1987, he was named President of a conservative think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Analysts consider Daniels as a man experienced in the details of government programs and federal budget matters from the Reagan years. He is known in Washington for his political savvy, shown in the Reagan White House during the troubled Iran-contra days and in his work with a series of successful Indiana politicians.
Daniels will help the Bush administration manage the huge federal budget and the record surpluses it will inherit from the Clinton administration. He will be managing a healthy economy that is fueling record budget surpluses, currently estimated at more than $4.7 trillion over the coming decade. But Bush has raised repeated concerns that the economy may be slowing. If he is right, then budget analysts may be forced to scale back their estimates of future surpluses, making fulfillment of Bush's plans more difficult.
Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana who hired Daniels out of Princeton University when Lugar was running for mayor of Indianapolis and later brought him to Washington as his administrative assistant, praised him as "a good person of idealism and character, a brilliant student with a very good organizational sense and a real grasp of strategy."
Now 51, Daniels was just 22 when he joined Lugar's mayoral campaign team. Later, he helped Lugar engineer the merger of city and county governments that is credited with starting the spectacular revival of Indianapolis's fortunes. Daniels managed Lugar's early Senate campaigns, ran his Washington staff and, while still in his early thirties, became the executive director of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Lugar chaired in the 1984 election cycle.
That job brought him to the attention of the Reagan White House, where he served as political director from 1985 to 1987. His tenure ended in a showdown with then-White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan. Daniels, who was trying to manage the political fallout from the Iran-contra scandals, involving a secret National Security Council effort to finance anti-communist guerrillas from the proceeds of arms sales to Iran, told Regan that Republicans had lost confidence in the chief of staff and he should consider resigning to shield the president from further damage. Instead, Regan dug in, and it was Da niels who resigned. He returned to Indianapolis, became head of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and for the first time joined a law firm, using the degree he had earned at Georgetown University.
Arab American leaders welcomed the appointment of Daniels to this senior position in the Bush administration. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Chief Operating Officer Ziad Asali said, “ADC strongly welcomes the spirit of inclusion illustrated by the appointment of two Arab Americans to cabinet posts in the Bush Administration. We feel that this represents further progress as Arab Americans strive to gain political empowerment and meaningful participation in our political system commensurate with the size and achievements of our community.”
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
