OK, I didn’t watch the debate last night. Sorry-not sorry. We got home late, and I could not overcome a strong feeling that it was an utterly pointless exercise. So, I had to watch it on replay this morning. Looking at today’s news reports, I was right. As usual, however, I have thoughts, which I invite you to:
“That’s one less thing to worry about,” Jefferson, Madison, and Burr crow in Act II of Hamilton: The Musical. They have just learned that their mutual rival, Alexander Hamilton, has eliminated his chances of ever becoming president by publicly confessing his affair with Maria (otherwise known as Mrs. James) Reynolds.
Donald Trump was probably saying the same thing about former Vice President Mike Pence’s listing presidential campaign even before it took on more water during last night’s GOP shout fest debate at The Reagan Library. On a debate stage where nearly every wannabe falsely insists they are following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, this was the place where a man who really is a genuine Reagan Republican should have been able to shine. He failed.
The best thing Pence had to say for himself in the spin room was that he was a “consistent conservative.” He followed up by saying that Donald Trump had once been a consistent conservative, too, but had strayed from the path. If Pence believes that, he is just nuts; if his campaign team told him to say that, they are incompetent. Pence is so careful when he speaks about Trump that he is incoherent, sometimes at the level of the sentence and the paragraph.
But the problem is, the man who will never be Kenough should be leading the charge against Trump: it is his only accomplishment, and he has decided to bury it, with the result that he has nothing else. Pence should be answering every question by reasserting how he, almost alone among Republicans, knew what to do on January 6 and offering six other examples of what he did behind the scenes to keep the administration from going completely off the rails. He should be talking about rebuilding the GOP around real conservative values. He should be talking about himself as the guardian of the Constitution.
Nope. The most notable thing Pence had to say on the stage? A terrible attempt to be funny after Chris Christie went after Joe Biden for “sleeping with a member of the teachers unions” (i.e., Jill Biden, Joe’s wife of 46 years, who is a member of the National Education Association.) Pence perked up. “My wife isn’t a member of the teachers union,” he said, “but I’ve got to admit, I’ve been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years. Full disclosure.” Karen Pence teaches art, and during her husband’s vice presidency, she worked at a Christian school that bars LGBT teachers from employment and asks parents to affirm in writing that their children are not LGBT. It was a terrible Dad joke and perhaps gave a couple of evangelicals in a nursing home a laugh. Everyone else was appalled, and the staffer who wrote that joke should be fired.
If all these fools are running on the hope that Donald Trump will somehow be incapacitated before the election, Pence still doesn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination. It isn’t just us homosexuals and the MAGAs wanting to hang him on January 6, 2021, who never want to see him on a debate stage again. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, 41.6% of Americans had a favorable view of Pence in January 2022, and with a few positive bumps here and there, he has slid to 28%. Yesterday, Pence was polling at less than 5%, lower than Viviek Ramaswamy. McKay Coppins, a political writer for The Atlantic, sat in on some Republican focus groups last spring, and here are some things people said:
“I don’t care for him … He’s just middle-of-the-road to me. If there was someone halfway better, I wouldn’t vote for him.”
“He has alienated every Republican and Democrat … It’s over. It’s retirement time.”
“He’s only gonna get the vote from his family, and I’m not even sure if they like him.”
“He just needs to go away.”
He just needs to go away. Think about it. And these were people who claimed they actually liked Pence. “What I found most fascinating about the voters’ digs at Pence was that they were almost always preceded by passing praise of his personal character,” Coppins wrote. “He was a `top-of-the-line guy,’ a `nice man,’ a `super kind, honest, decent’ person. Not only did these perceived qualities fail to make him an appealing candidate, but they were also often held against him—treated as evidence that he lacked a certain presidential mettle.”
But why did anyone, including Mike and Mother, think that signing up to be Donald Trump’s Vice President was a good route to the Oval Office? History says it isn’t (if you are wringing your hands over Kamala Harris, you may wish to listen up.) Only 15 of 49 vice presidents have become president, six because the elected president died (Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson), and one (Gerald Ford) because the Big Guy resigned. Four of those deaths were caused by assassination.
That’s 30% of veeps who go on to the big game at all and 24% who managed to get elected without inheriting the office first. These numbers would be even smaller if two out of the first three vice presidents—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—had not gone on to become president in their own right. And they ran under a different set of rules. Under the original Constitution, everyone ran for the top office; every Electoral College delegate cast two votes simultaneously for president and vice president, and the man who came in second after that one ballot became vice president. And—you guessed it—the President and Vice President were also then from different parties. That encouraged scheming, and scheming could make it difficult to govern.
[Sidebar: That changed after the election of 1800, the first in which candidates represented political parties, and the Democratic-Republican “ticket” (Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr) won. But because both were technically running for president, that meant equal numbers of electoral college votes. The plan had been for one delegate to switch to another candidate so that Jefferson would be president, but then Burr double-crossed TJ by “campaigning,” an ungentlemanly thing that had never been done. This caused Alexander Hamilton to step in and swing the deal for Jefferson. After that, Congress passed the 12th Amendment in 1803, which separated the presidential and vice presidential ballots. Aaron Burr never got to be President, and in July 1804, he shot Hamilton in a duel, which I am sure you can understand.]
In this day and age, governance is not the issue when picking a running mate, except when a really good vice president who has a long history on Capitol Hill can prop up a weaker presidential candidate. Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden all fit in this category, and not surprisingly, they were successful candidates in their own right.
But the expectation that being the veep adds significantly to a candidate’s resumé is just wrong. If that were true, more of them would succeed in snagging the top spot. Historically, vice presidents have to meet four standards: they have no embarrassing baggage; they “bring something to the ticket,” which generally means a massive number of votes in the Electoral College, a voting demographic, or both; they would make an adequate substitute in the event that the President dies or is incapacitated; and they don’t outshine the presidential candidate.
These are only general rules, of course. One of the strangest moments in the history of American elections was John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in 2008. Palin checked exactly none of these boxes: Alaska has three electoral votes, she was uneducated and ignorant, and her incompetence distracted from McCain.
By this standard, however, Pence was the perfect VP. Granted, Indiana has only 11 electoral college votes, but evangelicals know no state boundaries, and Pence could be counted on to inspire white, faith-based voters throughout the Midwest. He projects humility, and he had the capacity to look completely sincere and composed regardless of what crazy bullshit Trump was saying right in front of him. And, as Trump pointed out repeatedly, Pence looked the part. He wears a suit well. He has a gravelly, masculine voice. He seems like a serious person.
Sadly, however, these are only the qualities of a good vice president. And statistically, although fifty percent of bridesmaids are likely to become brides, capturing the #2 spot on a presidential ticket probably means—unless fate intervenes—that you have gone as high as you will go.
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Short takes:
Ron DeSantis boasts about his campaign to suppress voting and censor free speech about race, gender, and sexuality, otherwise known as the “war on woke.” But what he doesn’t talk about is how much his fascist agenda has cost the taxpayers of Florida. There are so many lawsuits against the state and DeSantis himself that the new state budget contains a line item just to pay the lawyers. So far, according to Tori Otten at The New Republic, that price tag is $17 million, overspending the $15.8 million in public dollars set aside for 2023. “But the fact is, the laws aren’t paying off, in every sense of the word. Not only are they costing his state millions, but they also belie the true extent of DeSantis’s influence,” Otten writes. (September 28, 2023)
At Salon, Amanda Marcotte has a theory about why Donald Trump won’t attend the debates: his team doesn’t want to risk him appearing in front of a mixed television audience. Trump’s rally speeches have become increasingly muddled and confused, suggesting that he is unclear about his recent history. If pundits have concerns about Biden’s age, Marcotte reminds us, Trump is only three years younger and has a family history of Alzheimer’s Disease. “Worse,” she writes, Trump “is clearly feeling his age a lot more than Biden, who does not forget what elections he ran in or how many world wars there were. Crucially, Biden isn't displaying the loss of impulse control we see with Trump, whose baseline of self-control was not good to begin with.” (September 27, 2023)
If you drive outside of cities, you have probably seen the numerous billboards shilling Pregnancy Crisis Centers, which pull in desperate women who want to have abortions and talk them out of it. Now, the reproductive rights movement has decided to adopt the same tactic, informing women in Dobbs states how and where to terminate a pregnancy with medication, which is still legal in all 50 states. “Before last November’s election, Swedish American artist Michele Pred worked with a group of artists to raise funds and work with companies to put up billboards featuring 10 artists and 18 billboards, located in 12 states and 14 cities, including Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky,” Carrie N. Baker writes at Ms. magazine. “For years, anti-abortion groups have dominated the American landscape with billboards. Now abortion rights supporters are battling back with their own. About time.” (September 27, 2023)