Unless They All Drop Out & Endorse Whoever's In 2nd Place
It wasn’t just Chris Christie who joined the GOP presidential nomination fray in the last 24 hours. Mike Pence and North Dakota billionaire Doug Burgum are in too. Christie announced last night in New Hampshire. Burgum wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal. Pence announced today— his 64th birthday— in Des Moines, where, by the way, Club for Growth and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity have started running anti-Trump advertising. The Koch ad is hammering one point: “Trump cannot win a general election, and America can't afford four more years of Joe Biden.” Neither organization has endorsed another candidate yet. So far, they just want someone who isn’t Trump.
Last night, the Wall Street Journal editorial board welcomed Pence to the melee by noting that “In an alternative universe, Mike Pence might be leading the Republican race for President in 2024. His résumé includes 12 years in the House, four as Governor of Indiana, and then four as Vice President, giving wise counsel and needed ballast to a volatile outsider in the Oval Office… One question is how much Mr. Pence will go after his former running mate. He can’t pretend Jan. 6 never happened, so maybe he’s better off arguing bluntly that he was right and Trump was catastrophically wrong. Republicans eyeing 2024 hardly want to empower Vice President Kamala Harris to throw out Electoral College votes on a whim, as Trump wanted Pence to do.”
As a conviction politician, Pence takes positions that aren’t always popular. He has defended reforming Social Security and Medicare, calling entitlements “the real driver of our national debt,” and saying Trump’s policy “is identical to Joe Biden’s.” He’s right on all of these points.
Pence has consistently supported assisting Ukraine in repulsing Russia’s invasion. He has called for a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks to set “a minimum national standard.” There’s a good question whether the Constitution grants Washington that power, and Republicans have spent decades arguing that abortion should be decided by the states.
A disciplined campaigner, Pence might prove less likely to make mistakes than his competitors. The flip side of this carefulness is that he has a reputation for being about as exciting as a mayonnaise sandwich on toast. Without a little extra zing, he might have difficulty getting the attention of GOP primary voters nationwide.
On the other hand, Pence’s attempt to sell conservative polices with civility might play fine at the Dairy Queen in small-town Iowa, where he’s placing his initial bet.
The long, dull launch ad that Pence released this morning was… not all that persuasive. Even the Politico morning crew panned it. “Pence,” they wrote, “is obviously a serious underdog against Trump. He’s universally known and yet is polling at similar levels to his much less well known rivals. But what is really striking to us about his launch ad, and the reason we pulled apart this one section in such detail, is how precarious Pence’s case against Biden is on a number of fronts. His campaign had to cherry-pick articles about the economy that don’t quite support his picture of economic calamity. The southern border, to everyone’s surprise, has experienced a precipitous drop in crossings since the end of Title 42. Pence uses a pre-war opinion piece about Biden not standing up to Putin, when the big news this week is how House Republicans are threatening to block a substantial aid package to assist Ukraine. That points to a general problem that any GOP nominee will face: Despite Biden’s poor poll numbers, he is not yet presiding over the kind of economic or foreign policy disaster that historically creates a one-term president— which might be one reason that the video also leans heavily on culture war grievances that target groups with little to do with the economy and foreign policy: BLM, trans rights activists, drag show performers.”
In case anyone has forgotten, Jonathan Swan reminded NY Times readers that Pence “is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency.” He doesn’t mean “fascist” like DeSantis and Trump; he means conservative, which has been and still is bad enough. Pence “wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare [although Meatball already voted for that when he was in Congress]. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.”
As Swan pointed out, that kind of conservatism meant a lot in the GOP pre-Trump. But Trump “transformed the GOP electorate, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to the truest of true believers. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different GOP, and it’s a different GOP because of his former boss… Whereas some Republican politicians [think Señor Trumpanzee and Meatball Ron] use God as a talking point and have little acquaintance with the Bible, Pence makes every decision through the filter of Scripture. When he says he has prayed on a decision, he means it, and that includes running for president.”
Pence has no trouble explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free-trader and a fiscal conservative. Nobody who knows him well doubts his sincerity on any of these issues…
The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to cheer Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If Pence, in a moment of introspection, wonders why the party he has long aspired to lead no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he may shoulder some portion of the blame himself.
The Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a trade policy that, for the most part, delighted protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more conventional national security advisers, in his final year he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Pence did not support.
…[I]t’s not just Pence’s anti-populist policies that hobble him. It’s that Republican voters have sharply different expectations of their leaders than they did during Pence’s political rise as a member of Congress and then governor of Indiana.
For the past seven years, Trump has trained Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in their candidates. He has trained them to value Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to vanquish their opponents. He has also trained them to avert their gazes from behaviors that were once considered disqualifying.
For four years, Pence, too, averted his gaze.