The Shadow President Page 3
I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.13
The second part of the modern right-wing movement advocated extreme free-market capitalism that would most benefit the megarich companies, business associations, and individuals who financed them. They wanted to slash taxes and social programs, eliminate regulations, and crush labor unions. The leading figures in this part of the right-wing movement were the billionaires Charles and David Koch, who had become two of the richest people in the world via growing family interests in oil, chemicals, agriculture, and other industries. Long-term political activists, the Kochs and their allies pursued political influence on a scale not seen in America since the start of the twentieth century, when corporate trusts so dominated politics that some members of the United States Senate were presumed to represent industries—oil, railroads, steel, and so on—rather than their constituents.
The modern influence game involves entities with names that are not immediately associated with a vested interest like an oil company. Instead, candidates and officeholders are supported in various ways by such organizations as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the State Policy Network, which all happen to have been supported by the Kochs. As described by historian Clayton Coppin, who was hired by Koch Industries to research the family and its activities, entities were given “obscure and misleading names” so that their true purpose would be hidden.14
Despite concerted effort and substantial spending, neither the economic Right nor the Christian conservatives got what they wanted in the 1980s. Eventually, those with libertarian leanings, who objected to the freedom-limiting social agenda of the religious activists, made an uneasy alliance with them in the interest of victory. This accommodation saw both sides stress areas of agreement and downplay points of difference. Election wins at the state level allowed for gerrymandering of congressional districts, which, in turn, put more federal offices within reach. However, no matter how much organizing and support the advocates provided, they still required presentable candidates who could win.
In an era when the political parties wielded less power than they had enjoyed historically, highly motivated individuals who could connect with voters on a personal level and were willing to align themselves with interest groups outside of the party represented the future of politics. When he entered politics, Mike Pence was one of a handful of men and women with the profile—ambitious, conservative Christian, free-market oriented, open to unconventional alliances—that made him an ideal Republican of the modern era. When he eventually made it to Congress in 2000, Pence was remarkable as one House GOP freshman who ticked off all of the Christian Right and economic conservative boxes. More typical was Darrell Issa of California, who came from a traditional Republican businessman background and supported gay rights. However, in the years that followed, Pence’s Christian brand of GOP politics would gain against Issa’s secular type until, by 2018, Issa would announce his retirement from politics and Pence would hold the second-highest office in the land.15
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Understanding Mike Pence requires an exploration of his origins, a true sense of how he developed into a political figure, and a grasp of the changing context of his time. He defines himself by his religion, his family life, his politics, and his attachment to his home state of Indiana. When assessing his own personality, he often references an old-fashioned sensibility. On a number of occasions, he has called himself “the frozen man.” Although he offered the term as a proud description of a person with unwavering respect for eternal values, it also suggests an icy rigidity he has shown with attempts to impose his values, including some associated with America’s bigoted past.16
Although Pence presents himself as a deeply moral man, his record indicates both a ruthlessness and a comfort with aggression that belie this pose. It is telling that Pence has claimed Charles Colson as his mentor. Colson was the convicted Watergate conspirator who wrote a so-called enemies list for Richard Nixon and proposed firebombing a Washington think tank in order to obtain documents it held. Pence may have embraced Colson as a “dear friend and mentor” because he had undergone a religious conversion, but it is just as likely that Pence was drawn to Colson’s lingering aggressive tendencies. In 1996, decades after Watergate, Colson wrote that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable” in order to thwart a secular government that was becoming intolerable for conservative Christians.17
Colson wrote of the looming showdown as Mike Pence was growing into the role of conservative Christian politician. Pence was helped in this project by many of the same forces—big donors, activist organizations, and new forms of media—that were changing the overall political landscape. He also benefited from the anger and fear of white conservative Christians who felt their status under threat. These Americans saw demographic trends that were rapidly making them into one minority group like so many others, and they felt alienated in a way that activated them as voters. They hungered for the America of an imagined past—more white, rural, heterosexual, and homogeneous—and which Pence seemed to represent. Put simply, Mike Pence might have been able to rise in another time, but the conditions that prevailed when he decided to make politics his life were especially favorable and became even more congenial as time passed.18
Pence’s religious beliefs impelled his effort to outlaw abortion and to limit equality for gay Americans. It allowed him to smile while embracing political allies whom others found morally repugnant. According to his faith, everything on earth is predestined by God’s will. If God chose to make Trump president, then it was fine for Pence to say and do just about anything to support him. It is the self-justifying theology that also enabled Pence to praise former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio’s commitment to “the rule of law” as he offered support for Arpaio’s bid to become his state’s next United States senator. He also said he was “humbled” by Arpaio’s presence at the rally where he spoke.
Unmentioned by Pence was the fact that Arpaio’s sheriff’s department had been notoriously aggressive about detaining Hispanics on the suspicion that they were in the United States illegally, and it was abusive to those who were arrested. Arpaio even operated an outdoor prison where conditions were so bad that he once called it a “concentration camp.” When a federal court ordered him to cease detaining people on the basis of their appearance, Arpaio failed to comply and was convicted of criminal contempt. President Trump had officially pardoned him, and this meant that Pence was happy to stand by the former sheriff, who was the living emblem of hostility toward immigrants, and sing his praises.
The occasion moved Washington Post columnist George Will, a conservative icon, to declare Pence “America’s most repulsive public figure.” After noting how Pence was “oozing unctuousness from every pore,” Will warned of the danger in his right-wing Christian populism, adding, “Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.” (His reference to the “vicious portion” was borrowed from Abraham Lincoln, who had used it to describe those who threatened the institutions of democracy.)19
As noted by Will, Pence represented the epitome of religion joined with politics in service to an extreme partisan faction. The combination was the basis for his self-confidence and righteousness, and it served his ambition. By 2017, he was one of the most effective politicians of the twenty-first century, and a contender to one day be president himself. Mike Pence was all these things, and thus a more complex and consequential figure than either his supporters or detractors knew.
2
MODEL CITIZEN
Look to the rock from which you are hewn and to the quarry from which you wer
e dug.
—Isaiah 51:1
The real Animal House fraternity (not the one in the movie) was at Dartmouth College, where it occupied a sturdy redbrick building with a gray slate gambrel roof and five gable windows. Practically bombproof, the building could withstand everything that the frequently drunk young men of Alpha Delta could do to it. In 1959, the year depicted in the film, frat brother Chris Miller witnessed the apex of the Animal House depravity, much of which found its way into his script for the 1978 film, which inspired imitation at colleges and universities nationwide. Young men and women wrapped themselves in bedsheets for drunken “toga” parties. Food fights became staples of campus life. And across America, the sex anthem “Louie Louie” was bellowed in basements and hallways and from open windows.
Phi Gamma Delta, at Hanover College, was no exception to the Animal House mania. With the same architecture, right down to the five dormers on the third floor, the fraternity house itself was practically a replica of Alpha Delta at Dartmouth. And with a squint, the brothers, among them binge drinkers and drug users, could be imagined as Bluto, Otter, Flounder, and the rest. The exception was Mike Pence, a square-jawed, blue-eyed young man with dark, curly hair and a brand of reticence rare in a college boy. In the movie, he might have been the fellow known as Charming Guy with Guitar, who sat on the stairs and strummed for a gaggle of coeds until the manic Bluto smashed his six-string to smithereens. Pence really did play the acoustic guitar for the young women at his college, but the similarities end there. Guitar Guy wasn’t an Animal House brother, while Pence was in fact the president of his fraternity when a much recalled moment of truth arrived.
It was evening, and beer flowed from kegs that had been procured with much planning and subterfuge. The Phi Gams were up to some happy mayhem when a nemesis straight out of central casting appeared at the front door. Although the associate dean’s arrival threatened trouble, it also sparked excitement as life came to imitate Animal House art. The brothers scrambled to hide the evidence—mostly booze and plastic cups—in the hope of avoiding shame, discipline, and even expulsion. The straight-and-narrow Pence went to the door. If anyone could persuade the dean that nothing was amiss, it was the chapter president. The guy was contemplating the priesthood and so looked the part of the trustworthy young man that all he had to do was lie a little bit—“Oh, no, that keg party was just a rumor”—for the sake of his brothers.
Poised to become a hero in the annals of Phi Gam, Mike Pence looked into the face of authority and immediately ratted everyone out. The sneaking around, the booze, and the scramble to cover it up—Pence spilled it all. Maybe he thought confession, if not contrition, would absolve them. It did not. Punishment was severe, as school officials basically grounded the whole crew for months. The Animal House of southern Indiana became a kind of sober house, and Pence became, in the eyes of some, a narc. Administrators rewarded him with a job offer, which he accepted along with his diploma. (He worked for the admissions office for about a year.) Decades later, the outcome shaded the way his friend from college, Daniel Murphy, described Pence to writer McKay Coppins. “Somewhere in the midst of all that genuine humility and good feeling, this is a guy who’s got that ambition,” said Murphy. He then added that he wondered if “Mike’s religiosity is a way of justifying that ambition to himself.”1
Many politicians have draped themselves in the flag while carrying a cross, but no modern American office-seeker has deployed faith more fully and successfully than Pence. As Murphy spoke, in 2017, his college friend had risen steadily from Indiana congressman to governor to vice president of the United States. All of this he had accomplished while performing as a middling lawmaker and stumbling so badly as governor that despite his party’s big advantages in registration and money, his reelection was in doubt.
Except for the comically ill-prepared Sarah Palin, who ran and lost with John McCain in 2008, Pence had been the least qualified and least known GOP running mate since Spiro Agnew joined Richard Nixon’s ticket in 1968. More remarkably, his ballot mate, Donald Trump, was widely regarded as temperamentally unqualified. But though Trump and Pence presented consistently opposing personas—the big-city vulgarian and the small-town squire—they were alike in essential ways. Each had identified national constituencies that were too small to win an election but so rabid that they couldn’t be shaken from their commitment. In Pence’s case, the core group almost entirely comprised politically conservative evangelical Christians. Trump appealed to antiestablishment voters—he also called them “uneducated”—who had special disdain for elite politicians and the people who voted for them. Both men devoted so much effort to the construction of a façade that these coverings—presented through the mass media—mattered more than the substance of their ideas or their governing skill. Trump held seemingly random and changeable positions on important issues and had never served in government. And while he offered himself as champion of the working class, his economic policies skewed heavily toward the elite. Pence was a long-serving elected official but so inept as a legislator that he couldn’t even get his colleagues to support a bill he sponsored to outlaw child pornography.2
(Pence’s aides had anticipated criticism of his record in Congress and prepared a written response, never released to the public, but obtained by the authors. It cites his advocacy on behalf of his constituents and the praise he had received over the years, from special-interest organizations including the Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth, and the American Conservative Union. “Mike has advocated tirelessly for Hoosiers who have been victims of natural disasters, including ice storms, floods and drought, to receive federal assistance to help get them back on their feet,” the report noted. It did not describe any successful legislative initiatives.)
In addition to the effort they put into image-building, Trump and Pence, each in his own way, had a remarkable ability to build and maintain a convincing self-image. For Pence, as with Trump, the construction project began in childhood, when he showed a certain natural charm and social skill that would carry him through life. While Trump had pushed and shoved and bullied his way into the public eye by whatever means necessary, including promoting his own sex scandal in the tabloid press, Pence was a well-mannered, conventionally ambitious sort. And where Trump squarely fit the boisterous P. T. Barnum American stereotype, Pence was Sinclair Lewis’s George F. Babbitt grown to enormous proportions—the humble man of the Midwest who commits to the American dream, understands how he is supposed to achieve it, and strives to be satisfied with the pursuit.
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Considered through the unfocused lens of family legend and lore, Mike Pence seems a rough blend of ethnic stereotypes. Unlike Trump, whose surname was originally Drumpf and who falsely claimed to be Swedish, Pence was certain of his roots. The U.S. chapter of his father’s German/Lutheran clan, originally called Bentz, starts with an early eighteenth-century immigrant named Michael, who joined a tide of Germans drawn to the Pennsylvania colony by its liberal acceptance of religious and political refugees. Michael Bentz crossed the Atlantic aboard the British ship Loyal Judith in 1732 and settled in the German community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The first change in the family name came upon his arrival in Philadelphia, where a local official spelled it “Pents.” By the time Michael married another German immigrant, Anna Elizabeth Huber, in May 1738, he was going by “Pence.” Nine months later, Anna and Michael had a son, their only child, who was also named Michael.
As frontier farmers, the first few generations of Pences moved to various towns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa. Hardship was common. Anna Elizabeth died at age twenty-nine. Another Pence drowned when his horse bolted off a ferry crossing the Ohio River. The vice president’s grandfather, Edward Joseph Pence, became a wealthy stockbroker in Chicago. Their grandfather was “a very hard man,” according to Mike Pence’s brother Gregory, because grandfather Edward had denied his namesake son, the vice president’s father, any help with college tuition. A loan from
an aunt helped, but money problems forced Edward Jr. to drop out of law school. He served in the army, fought in the Korean War, and then with his young wife, Mary Jane Cawley, moved to Columbus, Indiana, where he partnered in a business that sold oil products and operated gas stations and convenience stores.
Although the family carried a German surname, the Irish side dominated its identity. Mike Pence would speak often of his Irish heritage, and it was his Irish American grandfather who became most important to him among his extended family. The Pences were Irish American because of the vivacious Mary, who occupied the center of homelife and was the main influence on the children. Distinctly Irish in her wit and sociability, she was popular and admired, and she set the standard for her children to meet.3
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Edward Joseph Pence met the slender, auburn-haired Mary Jane Cawley in a bar in Chicago. A young woman four years younger than her suitor, her own family’s immigrant tale had begun with her father’s dream of a better life, free of the poverty and violence of Ireland. Twenty years old when he decided to emigrate, Richard Michael Cawley, known as Mike, was the third of six children. He had been raised in a small stone cottage planted on a hillside at a country crossroads called Doocastle, about fifteen miles south of what eventually would become the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. His father was a tailor.
Although too young to serve in World War I, Cawley had lived through the violence that began in 1919 with the Irish war for independence. Tubbercurry, the market town closest to Doocastle, was a hotbed of rebellion. Men from the town and surrounding farms joined so-called flying columns, which freed prisoners, burned public buildings, and attacked police. After one battle in which a police inspector was killed, British forces, aided by a civilian militia known as the Black and Tans, went on a rampage and burned several buildings, including a church. Although Ireland won independence with the treaty of 1921, fighting continued as factions vied for control. Cawley joined the Free State army force that battled with former comrades and others who had opposed the treaty.4