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Is Mike Pence a Decent Man?
Paul Meringoff, posting at Powerline, discusses former Vice President Mike Pence’s positioning for a presidential run in 2024.
The Washington Post reports that Mike Pence and his allies are gearing up for a possible run at the presidency in 2024. According to the Post, Pence’s friends and advisers say he’s likely to run for president, especially if Donald Trump doesn’t.
But even if President Trump doesn’t run in 2024, as Mirengoff notes —
One potential problem for Pence is that he refused, in his Senate role, to do Trump’s bidding when it came to blocking Joe Biden from becoming president. Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters consider Pence a turncoat because of that refusal.
Pence calls January 6 “a dark day at the Capitol” and says his focus is “entirely on the future.” This stands is contrast to Trump, who in his various interviews seems focused largely on the past.
In my view, Pence’s actions on January 6 count in his favor.
This last sentence is where I disagree with Mirengoff. I do not count Pence’s behavior in his favor. Pence was instrumental in General Flynn’s outster in the early days of the Administration. As subsequent events have proved, Flynn was successfully targeted by the Obama Administration and the Deep State (but I repeat myself). Pence was presumably unwitting in whatever role he played. It is still unclear to me what Flynn did to lose Pence’s confidence. Whatever it was, in hindsight it was no doubt manipulated by other actors.
Watching Pence left me with the impression that he was a decent man. His calm and measured demeanor was always a welcome counterpoint to a more dramatic President Trump. In Pence’s public comments before the 2020 election he always seemed to support President Trump’s policies. But what did he learn from watching the Deep State’s operations against President Trump and his family? Did he see an injustice and seek to defeat it? Or did he see his long understanding of politics confirmed and commit himself to playing by traditional Republican rules that made “good guys” win just enough so that “bad guys” could win most of the time?
As Mirengoff also states —
The Post reports that Pence wants “credit for what he sees as the good of the Trump administration.” This raises the question of whether Pence influenced that administration and, if so, in what ways.
There’s no doubt that Pence influenced the administration. Trump entered office with very little knowledge of the Republican Party. Not all that long before, he had been a Democrat.
Pence, a Republican insider, was there to help guide Trump when it came to selecting key personnel like White House chief of staff and the Cabinet. Pence wasn’t responsible for all of these selections — Trump took advice from other sources, too. But Pence was probably the most influential, and it was thanks in part to him that Trump imported the GOP establishment into his administration.
In my view, and eventually in Trump’s, many of those thus imported were sub-optimal selections, to put it gently.
Mirengoff lays out a compelling case for Pence being duped far too often. Here I agree.
But I have titled the post “Is Mike Pence a Decent Man?” and it is to that question I return: A decent man would have seen by November 2020 the terrible distortions wrought by President Trump’s enemies. A decent man would have hungered for the fight. A decent man would have chosen a way to get the constitutional outcome without accepting the irregularities as normal. Had Pence done what he so often did on Trump’s policies — articulating in a calm and clear manner what the problem was and how the solution was important — he would have done the nation a great service. Instead, he slipped back into a comfortable Republican role of amiable loser, vowing to fight another day.
If you are a political operative, it is the smart move because your assumption is that the game goes on indefinitely and giving the other side the opportunity to make a hash of it only improves your chances next time around. But the Progressives are not playing around. They.don’t.want.a.next.time. And Pence’s failure to help articulate and implement a strategy that would have resulted in confidence in the presidential election rather than assuming “fraud in an acceptable range”, makes him as culpable as the Progressives for what is happening now.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you can credit John Stuart Mill with some insight —
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.
We can substitute “decent” for “good” in the quote above. So, no, Mike Pence is not a decent man. Change my mind.
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I think he’s too nice. It’s a gloves on world in DC and I don’t mean mittens. Just the current voting system alone these days is questionably trustworthy – Pence would be a good diplomat.
The goods? What goods?
I do not believe that Pence is a decent or honorable man and not because of his perceived disloyal to President Trump but because throughout his career he demonstrated that he is an American Tartuffe assuming the character, enthusiasms, and inclinations of the group he wished to appeal to without acquiring any of the substance.
He was a democrat who voted for James Earl Carter twice (1976 and 1980) but seeing the improbability of being elected as a Catholic Democrat in Indiania he changed parties and apostatized to generic evangelical Republican to appeal to the trend. He was a radio and TV talk show whose opinions were always generic, inoffensive, and safe.
I believe the majority of GOP voters will want President Trump reinstated by the election of 2024, if he runs. The man has amazing stamina, and could well be up to the task but age 75 is different from age 78. It’s also possible that he will do so well restoring GOP congressional majorities in 2022 that he will adopt a mentorship role (echoing The Apprentice) and focus on the looming question of a succession plan for leadership of his movement.
If The Donald finally begins feeling his age, senses his speeches are losing their edge, or wants to ensure the movement will permanently control the GOP, he could endorse a successor or even set up a series of personally-supervised primary debates. Hell, he could even run as Vice-President, where he could serve as impeachment insurance and lord it over the Senate. Or he could wage war vs. his greatest enemy (no, not China, not the Democrat Party) by putting together an investor group to take over one of the three core broadcast TV networks and other communications assets. He could be elected Speaker of the House in 2022, or take over a Senate seat if Marco Rubio runs for Governor to replace President DeSantis.
We know there probably won’t be a Trump/DeSantis ticket in 2024, because presently both reside in Florida and we need the electoral votes. If DeSantis wins re-election by a large margin in 2022, Trump may see enough there to endorse him. If DeSantis commits to serving his full term, Mike Pompeo is, in my opinion, the smartest and most qualified VP pick if President Trump is certain of his loyalty. Maybe some guest talks at the rallies would sharpen Pompeo’s talent at connecting with an audience.
I don’t see Mike Pence fitting into any of this. He was in an impossible position when state legislatures validated all the ballots in several states where there were clearly irregularities. It was too late, there wasn’t enough proof, and the game was lost when freewheeling vote-by-mail rules were hastily (sometimes illegally) implemented, and when election observers in key precincts were illegally excluded or didn’t sign on for that duty in the first place due to health concerns. Blame election 2020 on the pandemic. But in his role as head of the virus task force Pence did little to take charge, get medical reporters into those press conferences instead of politicos, put Operation Warp Speed timelines into the heads of all voters, and unite the country against the invisible enemy from Wuhan.
Pence may have been in a disadvantageous position once the legislatures certified, but it was his silence that signaled to GOPe that even in states where Republicans held commanding positions in legislatures that it was time to “go along to get along”. In other words his silence gave comfort to the media and let them train full fire solely on President Trump. Had Pence voiced any misgivings whatsoever about how important it was to get it right — not that he win, but that the 70+ million voters that supported him could have confidence that the outcome was legitimate. Pence was very good and using the calm and politic manner to convey to people whose hair wasn’t on fire what was wrong and what needed to be corrected. The media made it all about President Trump’s ego. Pence would have made it more of a national interest to get it right, than a national interest to bury the questions. Burying the questions and the actions of the current regime have made this a grave mistake.
I think this is where he went wrong. And I still think he didn’t want to stir things up anymore than they were. Plus I wonder if Trump’s attack on him made him even more reluctant to speak up.
Mike Pence. Its a funny name. Used to drive around in a van. Solved mysteries.
Remember the timing of the attack. It wasn’t until Pence had let things go too far without him making common cause with President Trump on election integrity.
My thoughts are similar. He’s a very decent man. He may even be a good politician, but he’s just not dynamic enough for the top of the ticket in this day and age. But then again Sleepy Joe won from his basement. Under the right conditions I can see Pence winning up against Biden. Does he draw as much as Trump? No. But then he doesn’t have the negatives either. Mike Pence would not be my first choice, but he would not be a non-starter for me.
I hope that is obvious to everyone. Pence ain’t Eisenhower. We could use an Eisenhower, I think. Too bad our retired generals are all shilling for [insert military-industrial complex firm here] and never did get to be real leaders. Man, had one of them gone to be Dean of an engineering school I’d be hopeful, but naaaw… the real money’s in piracy.
He may be a decent* man, but also a gutless one with no business in leadership. There are plenty.
*Define decent again.
Somehow, he prayed on it and then took Mitch McConnell’s lead doesn’t cut it with me.
We should have known the moment we saw the fly.
Jeff Goldblum.
This anecdote explains a lot about the election events and Pence’s role in them.
Humiliation is the hardest emotional blow people can get. It is very traumatic. (I once read about a study in which people were asked to rank their greatest fears, and public speaking was higher than death. Nothing scientific about that study, but if it’s even in the ballpark, it says a lot about human psychology: people are terrified of looking like a fool.) Humiliation comes up in cases of emotional abuse all the time as a really serious problem for the victim.
I don’t know if this was a chronic problem between the two, but if it happened even two or three times, it would explain why Pence turned away from Trump at the end. And if it’s true, it would explain Pence’s actively working against Trump, if he did. Pence has a lot of pride. He would not take to this treatment in public kindly.
Pence has always impressed me. I’ve always given Trump a lot of credit for picking him. It told me that underneath the jokes, Trump was a very serious person who understood the grave responsibility he would be assuming. Pence was certainly capable of stepping into the Oval Office if needed. In contrast, Clinton’s pick–Tim Kaine–was a joke. Pence cleaned his clock, as the expression goes, in the debate. Kaine was a Kamala Harris pick: someone really incompetent. It was an insult to the nation. (And so is Harris, by the way.)
Pence gave a truly memorable speech when he received the remains of our Korean War military. In fact, the Trump administration deserves an enormous amount of credit for accomplishing that.
You had to see it. Pence wasn’t asked to speak at that time, and Trump didn’t expect him to speak, but he stepped forward to the podium. And I followed what he said, and they were complete sentences I think, but they literally had no meaning — complete double-talk. And Trump didn’t loudly ridicule him, he took 3 seconds to marvel at Pence’s performance as they skirted around one another to resume their places, and the mic just picked it up.
I thought it was a rare moment that showed Trump’s political candor.
Okay. Thank you. Good to know. :-)
John Dewey recruited the neomarxists of the Frankfurt School and put them where they could shape American K1-12 education and corrupt the humanities in general.
Critical race theory isn’t new. The CPUSA started to focus on racial divisions in the US in the 1920s when classical Marxist industrial class analysis began to look problematic in the US. This didn’t start with critical race theory; critical race theory is what this tactic became in the generations following the 1960s and the long march into the institutions.
Conquest and Derbyshire didn’t have it quite right. The postwar British secret service was a bureaucracy controlled by a secret cabal of the enemies of the country, not of the bureaucracy.
Bureaucracies tend to serve themselves; when “themselves” has been captured by the entities the bureaucracy is supposed to regulate (FDA and CDC and Big Pharma come to mind) or when “themselves” become powerful enough to become what Sundance is calling the Fourth Branch of the US government that doesn’t look like victory to me. It looks more like we are becoming what the American people thought we were fighting in WWII and the Cold War.
You say “frittered away.” I say that when your educational institutions train enough enemies of the culture, said enemies don’t have to conspire. They can act in a decentralized manner.
Relevant to Pence’s actions (inaction) from Powerline blog: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/the-claremont-statement.php
This puts more dishonor on the man and our GOP “friends”.
I agree with this point completely. It would have made a big difference. His lack of support has made me wonder if he was in on the plot described in Time magazine. There were a lot of people who “jumped ship” from the Trump administration: Betsy DeVos, Larry Kudlow, and so many others who surprised me.
There’s a phenomenon in divorce law of one parent’s poisoning the children’s mind against the other parent. After the first debate, when Trump did well but was clearly off some of his game because he had the covid-19 virus, it seemed like a lot of people in Trump’s administration either actively worked against him or were quiet while others did so. I think the hard-core Never Trumpers may have poisoned the mind of other administration cabinet members, and perhaps even Pence, against Trump.
It’s funny. Pence is a decent man, but he agreed to be Satan’s sidekick. What did he hope to do by accepting the VP slot? Help Trump? Moderate Trump? Reach for the proverbial brass ring?
I’ve lost track of who made the comment but on a podcast I heard this:
“Never forget. Pence is the Bush family insurance policy.”
Truer words were never spoken.