>>SOUTHERN INDIANA — For two-thirds of the Mitch Daniels governorship thus far, there’s been a Speaker Pat Bauer. With sine die coming to the Indiana General Assembly early last Saturday, the riveting question becomes whether this governor gets a monolithic executive/legislative tandem for his final acts.

For Democrats, the question is whether the House caucus can do what it did in 1998 when it beat the odds under trying national trends (the impeachment of President Clinton) and retook control, setting the stage of Bauer’s ascension to the helm five years later. After losing the speakership in 2004, he regained it in 2006 and has forged one of the most powerful legacies in modern Indiana history.

This past weekend, though, it was hard to avoid the notion that the Daniels-Bauer dynamic is about to change in dramatic fashion between now and next January.

“I like him but he’s a tough adversary,” Gov. Mitch Daniels said Monday. “He looks at the world in a totally different way that is much friendlier to big government and much less concerned about the growth of the private sector that has to pay all of the bills.”

“Speaker Bauer is an expensive date,” Daniels added. “He believes in a lot more spending. They tried to spend more than a billion dollars just a few months ago. Think of what a fix we’d be in if we surrendered to that. The next budget will be even harder than the last one. The taxpayers would be a lot safer if we were about to work with a different general assembly.”

The 2010 legislative session also revealed cracks in the Bauer façade. While he had a 52-member majority, it was a compromised 51 when State Rep. Dennie Oxley suffered a catastrophic heart attack that has currently in what State Rep. Eric Turner describes as a “semi-conscious state.”

Last month, Bauer reprimanded Speaker Pro Tempore Chet Dobis after he split with the caucus on a report on the Illiana Expressway. With Oxley never reporting and Dobis defecting, the intransigence exposed the weakening underpinnings of Bauer’s grip within his own caucus. The Dobis discipline allowed Bauer to elevate State Rep. Earl Harris after repeated speculation centered on whether Bauer’s support amongst the House Black Caucus was compromised. That speculation stemmed from late in the 2009 long session when many African-Americans defiantly voted against the budget.

Daniels observed on Monday that Bauer “has shown himself over the last couple of years to be extraordinarily effective at getting his people to not ever step out of line, and if they do, the consequences are pretty severe.” Right, Chet Dobis?

In early February, Dobis described Bauer as paranoid and losing his grip on power. “I think he must see him in his dreams because he’s always lurking in the shadows even when he’s not even around,” Dobis told the Times of Northwest Indiana about the Bauer-Daniels dynamic. “The chemistry is not good in here.”

Another retiring Democrat, 36-year veteran State Rep. Dennis Avery told the Evansville Courier & Press, “It’s frustrating that decisions are made by a handful of people; that the membership does not have the kind of input that we should have.”

Bauer and his staff cannot explain the absence of Oxley, nor do they express any concern for the 67,000 disenfranchised citizens in the 73rd District. On the final day, State Rep. Craig Fry disappeared, insisting he was attending to his sick father in Florida while members of his own caucus were whispering that he was really attending baseball games. With the job trust issue wobbling and the specter of a potential party-line vote, Bauer didn’t have enough bodies to make a stand. He was losing grip.

Bauer did have successes, passing his ethics bill and a jobs package, one of them coming on with the embattled Illiana.

Facing House Democrats are political threats at just about every turn. President Obama is unpopular and about to force a critical vote on health reforms. There is a severe recession that has left Indiana’s jobless rate a 9.7 percent and revenues falling behind projections for 17 consecutive months. U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, who on five occasions had long coattails that brought more Democrats into the Indiana House, is retiring. Add to that the 25 Republican recruits taking aim at Democratic incumbents as well as open seats and Bauer faces daunting political challenges.

This past session, Daniels realized that Bauer would remain such a barrier that he selected just three issues – the referendum on the constitutional property tax caps, ending social promotion for non-reading third-graders, and the confiscation of gaming winnings from deadbeat parents —to press for this session.

“With maybe our least eventful session of the six I’ve been involved with, our focus will now be very much maintaining the fiscal solvency of the state,” Daniels said.

After November, either Daniels will be in the best position of his governorship to ram through the rest of his reforms, or he will have to resign himself to working around a “Speaker Bauer” if the Democrats can defy odds and maintain a majority.



Brian Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com