The Governor Who Cut His State Down to Size

Take some time to read this, it may just open your eyes

Just a few points from the article:

Elected governor, he created a new budget office on his first day in office, and moved to decertify the state-employee unions the next day, a step that made it possible to trim the state's work force and reward workers for performance instead of seniority. Unlike the current furor in the more heavily unionized Wisconsin, it caused only limited friction.

What did provoke ire were two moves the governor thought would be more anodyne. He pushed through uniform adoption of Daylight Savings Time, in place of a county-by-county patchwork, and he leased the Indiana Turnpike to a Spanish-Australian consortium for 75 years.

After two years in office, he had an approval rating of just 37%, tied with President Bush. In 2006, his party lost control of the Indiana House.
"It was humbling," Mr. Daniels says. "But I tell you this, we never took a poll to determine what we were for."
His efforts to trim government ended up boosting his image. He sold thousands of state-owned cars and cut the state work force to levels not seen since the 1970s. In a region awash in government red ink, he turned an inherited $600 million deficit into a $370 million surplus the next year. He has rebuilt the state's reserve funds, which now top $800 million.

From the Wall Street Journal