Mike Pence did a curious thing during the video in which he announced that—shock of shocks—he is running for president.
Pence touted his tenure as vice president of the United without mentioning the name of the president with whom he served.
There could be a reason for that.
Donald Trump, the president whose name Pence chose not to speak during the short video, summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, and urged it to storm the U.S. Capitol. Then Trump sat on his hands for hours as the same mob ransacked the capitol building while shouting “Hang Mike Pence” and endangering the then vice president’s family.
An incident such as that could put a crimp in a friendship that, from the beginning, was built on mutual political convenience.
Not long after the video came out, the strains in the Trump-Pence relationship became clearer when the former vice president delivered his formal announcement speech in Iowa.
There, Pence did his best to take credit for the good, as he perceived it, that occurred during the Trump presidency—while holding Trump responsible for all the upheaval, trauma and division that accompanied The Donald’s four-year presidency.
Pence set himself an awkward task with that speech. It is difficult to both embrace and pummel another person at the same time.
Pence tried, though, and performed the chore clumsily.
He insisted he holds no animus toward “his former running mate”—said, in fact, that he prayed for him on a routine basis—but then he also lumped Trump and President Joe Biden together as if they were identical twins.
The linkage is laughable. The two presidents may agree that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west—but not much beyond that.
What’s more, it’s difficult to imagine two grown men much more different in terms of temperament. Trump is all thunder, dark clouds and flashes of lightning, with explosions and zigzags of mood too fast for the eye to track. Biden is the steadiest of plodders, a leader who almost seems to take a perverse pride in his inability to fill even a small room with the power of his personality.
The only thing that does tie Trump and Biden together is that they both stand in Pence’s way.
That is why he had to conjure up such an unlikely pairing.
To get past both presidents, Pence needs to cast a kind of spell, one that enchants voters into forgetting much of this country’s history, both recent and distant, and ignoring basic realities.
Pence said in both the video and the speech that America is lost, but that we are not to worry.
He knows the way back.
To make his case, he argues that inflation is running rampant and that wages are in free fall.
Neither assertion is true.
Inflation has been slowing for several months as the world economy straightens out the supply-line kinks and other disruptions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
And wages have grown steadily, particularly among low-wage earners, as the labor shortage has deepened. Even real wage growth—wage growth adjusted for inflation—has begun to signal that it is about to take off.
Such realities do not fit Pence’s narrative.
He touted the economy of the Trump-Pence administration as an unqualified triumph. In fact, the U.S. economy during the Trump years in terms of growth in the gross domestic product and wages lagged behind almost every other post-World War II presidency.
Similarly, Pence’s railing about the U.S. debt and his argument that the Great Society somehow is responsible for it ignores the fact that a third of the nearly $32 trillion America owes can be attributed to tax cuts he supported as both congressman and vice president.
Because Pence cannot reference a real past and must instead create an illusory one, he also contrives an equally unreal present.
He wants to run a campaign long on symbols, short on facts.
Perhaps that is why the Republican president shown in Pence’s campaign video was another political conjurer, Ronald Reagan.
Like Pence, Reagan evoked a past that never happened and summoned us to a future cloaked in dreamy mist, swearing all the while we could dance the whole way along a yellow-brick road while neglecting to mention that debts burdening generations of our descendants fund the journey.
Back to the future, one more time.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
