He said it a few days ago but it’s best contemplated today, through the lens of the fiscal apocalypse that is Obama’s budget. All along, I’ve been thinking that the Romneyites want this guy to stay out of the race lest the moderate/managerial wing of the primary grow too crowded. But now? Mitt would inevitably use Daniels as a foil to frame himself as the voice of reason on health-care reform, hammering Mitch the Knife as a de facto rationer. Then Daniels would turn around and bludgeon him for the sins of RomneyCare. And the Palinistas would watch it unfold, rubbing their hands with glee and chuckling all the while.

I hope he does get in just because I’d love to see a serious debate about entitlements in the primary. Medicare is a 10,000 lb. anchor dragging the feds beneath the fiscal waves. How are we going to float?

“We all want to live forever, we want everything done for us to live forever,” the Indiana governor told a small group of health reporters. “We cannot afford, no one can, to do absolutely everything that modern technology makes possible to absolutely the very last day of the very last resort.”…

Daniels advocated for a more patient-centered approach, where families tackle the tough decisions of limiting care. “Someone will have to be making the decisions. I prefer it not to be the government,” he said.

“Look at it this way. It’s the most human thing in the world, when a loved one is in a desperately ill state and the question is, we can try this thing that has almost no chance of working, and it’s going to cost an incredible amount? Any person of course says, ‘Try it.’….It’s the hardest of all the questions. I don’t think there’s a more humane way than the re-involvement of patients and loved ones, to a greater extent.”

A reporter asked him about Medicare reimbursement for end-of-life consultations with doctors (which was part of the “death panels” outcry), but he dodged it. This sort of rhetoric isn’t new for him, really: Last summer he knocked congressional Republicans for using Medicare as a weapon against ObamaCare, knowing that the more lip service we pay to the sanctity of socialized medicine now, the more difficult it’ll be later to explain to voters that the program’s been unsustainable for years and must change soon. It sounds like he’s advocating some form of “soft rationing” here, where Medicare patients and their families would choose among various options for deathbed treatment rather than the feds dictating any particular course of action. He’ll take a beating for it in the primaries, but as I said up top, merely forcing the discussion of how to pay for Medicare will be a productive use of primary time. And then of course it’ll all be forgotten in the general election, when Obama and the Democrats inevitably accuse the Republican nominee of wanting to take away granny’s medicine and he/she quickly backs down.

In other “Daniels controversy” news, here’s a clip dedicated to the alleged scandal of a would-be president having once been busted for pot. Given that our current president cops to having experimented with coke, I thought we were waaaay past this sort of thing. Guess not.