Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels attacked President Obama on Sunday, characterizing his first term as a "failed presidency"� and saying the president was "AWOL"� on debt reduction.

The election will be "a choice between [Obama] and a future of certain decline and indebtedness, and the Republican Party," Daniels said on CNN's State of the Union.

Daniels, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget who was tapped to deliver the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address this year, called the current economic climate "the worse recovery ever from a serious recession.""History says the deeper the down, the sharper the up," he said. "It should've been a very vigorous" recovery.

Daniels went on to squarely...