Stopped by the National Governors Association meeting yesterday.
I don’t want to sound like a bad David Broder parody, but you are impressed at these things by the earnest, bipartisan tone. By the time I got there, a lot of the bigger names with presidential ambitions had cleared out leaving those who wanted to sit through the Danish Energy and Climate Minister’s talk on cap-and-trade. At the conference, I spoke on camera with Hawaii’s Linda Lingle, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, South Dakota’s Mike Rounds, Vermont’s Jim Douglas and Montana’s Brian Schweitzer.
My interview with Lingle should be available later. She cited an interesting exchange with Obama over those TARP recipient junkets. My videotalks with Douglas and Rounds look like something out of Cloverfield and could lead to nausea so we won’t post those but I’ll sum them up later.
Meanwhile, here’s Daniels. I thought it interesting that the Indiana Governor, who served as George W. Bush’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, was hopeful about Obama being able to fix entitlements and was, at first blush, supportive of the “health reform is entitlement reform” concept.
Montana’s Brian Schweitzer discusses a behind-the-scenes moment at the White House with President Obama as well as why the Santelli effect isn’t quite catching on in Montana.
