Neither mayors nor governors were in fashion when I was an undergraduate hanging around the Institute of Politics at Harvard. Discussions of nonfederal government were comparatively rare. Among the politically attuned, most eyes were on Washington, keeping tabs on national policy, or on the still-more-alluring arena of foreign affairs. When you did hear about the state or local level, it was usually in a program or study group that fused the two together in the compound phrase “state and local,” pronounced almost as if it were one word, stateandlocal. These dynamics were set in opposition to national politics, and states usually got attention for the tension between them and the federal government, as if state-federal power struggles were all that mattered in federalism. Yet some of the most important policy dynamics of our time have to do with the relationships, and the tension, between state and local government.
I knew as soon as I took office that it would be important to form a positive relationship with our Republican governor, Mitch Daniels. Daniels was first elected in 2004, when he defeated South Bend’s own Joe Kernan, making him a villain to Democratic partisans around here. A compact man known for a powerful intellect and a temper that could flare up on occasion, he had been a protégé of Senator Dick Lugar and served alternately as a top pharmaceutical executive in Indiana and a Republican White House official.
By the end of his tenure, Daniels was popular across the state and often mentioned as a presidential prospect for the technocratic center-right. But his first term was marked by intense political battles, in which his greatest nemesis and foil was a Democrat from South Bend, Indiana House Speaker Pat Bauer. Daniels’s first major and controversial policy was to lease the Indiana Toll Road, which ran through our northern part of the state, to a private entity and use the money to finance road projects across Indiana. The privatization was unpopular here, and fiercely opposed by the Democrats, led by the old-school Speaker Bauer. When the seventy-five-year lease to a private operator went through, the flow of funds to other parts of the state felt to many here like a poke in the eye. Viewing Daniels about the same way most people in the area did, I had briefly worked for his 2008 opponent, taking a few weeks off from McKinsey to help with policy research, press, and debate preparation—a fact that I hoped would not come to light while I was in the process of reaching out to him.
But in working on his opponent’s campaign, I also began to realize what had made Daniels a formidable opponent—and such a highly effective governor that some national conservatives saw him as their best hope of challenging President Obama. He was a business-minded technocrat, with very little interest in the social issues that were used to rile up electoral bases in campaign years but left communities divided long after their political usefulness expired. Instead, he was extremely focused on economic issues and interested in making government work well, even achieving the improbable feat of reforming the Bureau of Motor Vehicles into an efficient and user-friendly customer service organization. (Since the BMV is the one state office that virtually every citizen uses, it was also a politically clever thing to do.)
When I had been campaigning for mayor, a frequent gripe was that the state’s economic development agency had done virtually no deals in the South Bend area since Daniels had become governor. Blame went in all directions. Many believed that we were being punished, that because our northern region was far from Indianapolis and generally voted Democratic, the state government ignored us or even went out of its way to withhold opportunities from us. Others insisted that our woes were of our own making—that South Bend was so unfriendly to business and beholden to labor groups that it was impossible for even the best-intentioned Republican administration in Indianapolis to work with us.
I didn’t care whose fault it was; I just wanted it to change. And I sensed that the governor might feel the same way. I had no use for the Bush administration of which he had been a part, and he would probably never agree with my full-throated support for public education and organized labor rights. But despite our differences in ideology, it seemed that he and I shared a desire to use data and good management practices to drive better government. And politically, it made sense for him to score economic wins anywhere in the state he could, including our area.
Eager to work across party lines, I gathered some community and business leaders and invited him to lunch in South Bend. The meeting was genial, and afterward he made some flattering comments to the Tribune for a story that ran with the headline “Governor Likes South Bend’s New Attitude.” We agreed that he and I should be working together to find opportunities, and sure enough, a few weeks later Daniels was back in South Bend, celebrating the expansion of a local steel-box manufacturer with help from state incentives—and an end to the dry spell of state economic development wins in our region.
It was my first major experience in this kind of bipartisan cooperation. The most important thing I learned was that it has little to do with stretching or changing your beliefs. The governor and I did not persuade one another to become more centrist on any particular issue; rather, we found the areas where we had common goals and stuck to them. Plus, by collaborating on a specific, measured effort, we gained ground in trust and familiarity that would be helpful in the future. But Governor Daniels was in his final year, and I would have to start over again when the 2012 election yielded his successor.
I had known of Congressman Mike Pence for years, since he was a highly visible figure among the conservative warriors in Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. So when I actually first met him at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2011, I was surprised by how affable, even gentle, he seemed. I was with a group of candidates and elected officials attending the Indy 500, and it was a warm day at the speedway. (Then-reality-television-personality Donald Trump had been set to drive the pace car that day, but had backed out for some unexplained reason.) As we milled around near our seats, someone spotted Pence walking along the concourse to his box and introduced us. Dressed in the politician’s off-duty uniform of a blue oxford shirt and khakis, he very much looked the part: a congressman going to a sporting event. We exchanged some pleasantries, and I didn’t think much of it or expect to see him anytime soon. But a year and a half later, I was sitting in a folding chair in the January sun facing the west front of the Indiana capitol at his invitation, looking through a cloud of my own breath as he took the oath of office and became Indiana’s governor. Afterwards, at a reception for attendees, I caught up to him and mentioned my eagerness to work together to benefit the city. He gave a sincere nod and heartily agreed, and a long and complicated relationship began.