INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has volunteered to climb a 95-foot launch tower and strap himself into a harness to slide 800 feet down a zip line at the Super Bowl Village when it opens just two blocks from the Statehouse next month.
He’s hoping it’s the only hoopla anyone connected with state government will create when an anticipated 150,000 visitors descend on the capital city for the NFL championship game that attracts media from around the world.
Hanging out there in the realm of possibility for poor publicity for a governor entering his final year in office: A headline-grabbing protest or political stunt prompted by a bitterly divisive piece of legislation known as the “right to work” bill.
In a wide-ranging, end-of-the-year interview with reporters three days before the new year, Daniels acknowledged the rampant rumors that bill opponents may try to upstage Super Bowl festivities with their own kind of spectacle.
“I surely hope nobody would misuse an occasion like that,” Daniels said.
The governor, who told reporters he paid “a lot of money” for tickets to see the Feb. 5 game to be played in Lucas Oil Stadium in downtown Indianapolis, said he’ll be using the Super Bowl — and all the parties and events surrounding it — to woo what he called “important decision-makers” who could bring jobs to Indiana. The zip line excursion — in an outdoor venue created for pre-game parties — is just one of the ways he’ll make himself visible.
He said any attempt to politicize the Super Bowl would be both damaging and disappointing.
“There are an awful lot of Hoosiers who just want to enjoy the game ...,” Daniels said.
Timing and location make the right-to-work bill ripe for some rabble-rousing. When the Indiana General Assembly goes back into session on Jan. 4, Daniels wants legislators to pass a measure that would prohibit employers from entering into contracts that require workers to pay fees to support a union as condition of employment. A similar bill last year set off a quorum-busting, five-week walkout by House Democrats and ushered in long days of loud protests by union sympathizers in and outside the Statehouse.
The GOP majority in the House and Senate could try to rush the bill through, before thousands of football fans, scores of news crews, and dozens upon dozens of dignitaries check into the downtown hotels located near the stadium and within shouting distance of the Statehouse.
But that would be difficult to do, which is why House Democrats have fueled rumors that something is afoot. State Sen. Tim Skinner recently told his hometown newspaper, The Tribune-Star in Terre Haute, that Democrats were talking with attorneys and looking at the state constitution for any possible means of “putting a wrench in these gears” short of violating state law.
Daniels is convinced that’s a mistake. During the year-end interview with reporters, he said he was a late convert to the right-to-work bill, but now a believer. “It’s not a silver bullet ... but it would help in a significant way” attract new employers to the state. Daniels described the legislation as a jobs-growth bill, a description that the Indiana AFL-CIO rejects.
During the interview, Daniels talked about other legislation he favors, including a bill that would give the Indiana Commission for Higher Education more power to rein in college costs. It would allow the commission to review credit requirements for some university degrees that may be excessive, and therefore more costly to students paying tuition for additional credit hours.
He also talked about legislation that he didn’t get done in past years and doubts will make any progress in the short 2012 session that, by law, has to wrap up by mid-March. That includes compelling the state’s public universities to keep their costs under control. He blamed the “inertia up and down the whole system” of higher education for that failure.
He also admitted that the momentum he helped create last session for criminal-sentencing reform to rein in prison costs had died after a major reform bill died last session. “I’m not finding too many other friends of (that) reform this year.”
He also said he’d learned some things in his years of office. One is that he doesn’t think he would have run for a third term had state law not limited him to two, four-year terms. “Maybe after eight years,” Daniels said, “it’s a good time to let somebody else have a go at it.”
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