David Brooks thinks that Mitch Daniels would be a great president, or at least this is what he said in his column today. Brooks’ case centers on the outstanding job that Daniels has done as governor of Indiana. Brooks is especially impressed with the extent to which Daniels has improved the state’s fiscal situation.

While that may be interesting to some, most people are probably most concerned about jobs. (Remember the recession?) If we compare job growth in Indiana with job growth (or more accurately loss) with its mostly Democratically governed neighbors, it doesn’t look especially good.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Indiana lost 6.5 percent of its jobs between December of 2004 (the month before Daniels took office) and December of 2010. This beats Michigan’s 13.0 percent and Ohio’s 7.7 percent, but is worse than Illinois’ loss of 5.2 percent of its jobs. It’s also worse than the loss of 3.3 percent of jobs in Wisconsin and 0.2 percent of jobs in Iowa.

I suppose that Daniels campaign slogan can be “better than Michigan.”