The Shadow President Page 7
Pence wasn’t alone in the struggle to make a good impression. Sharp was the incumbent but could not let his guard down. As a former college professor, his biographical sketch suggested the image of “experience, intelligence, and open-mindedness.” Of course, a sizeable number of voters would consider these to be negative traits indicating he was a wishy-washy, out-of-touch political insider. No one who hoped to be known would be satisfied with a chalk-outline identity, but as expediency forced them to choose these traits, the process revealed something meaningful. Their selected traits reflected an idealized self—the one they strived to achieve—and also brought attention to what they left out. Politics is a game of ego and ambition, but both men avoided being identified by either of those. Error and incompetence are also normal in politics, but admitting them is anathema.
All the posturing made Sharp and Pence easy targets for the jibes delivered at a traditional election year roast sponsored by local journalists. The event was held at a convention center in downtown Muncie, where about 175 people sat at big round tables dining on banquet food and ready to laugh. Sharp and Pence were required to sit there facing the audience, smiling and chuckling as roasters stood and mocked them from a lectern.
Sharp is “so broad-minded he can’t even take his own side in an argument.”
Pence is so conservative “he doesn’t try anything first.”
Sharp’s first election victory came against an opponent who campaigned like a “dead squirrel.”
Pence “rides through this district on a tricycle. Sharp walks because he can’t ride” a bike.
“Phil reminds me of a cat watching a canary fall into a goldfish bowl. He knows if he waits long enough, he can have two meals at once.”8
Pence and Sharp also faced off in two televised debates. A panel of journalists went through the issues. Sharp responded testily to a question about campaign contributions, saying the suggestion that he was somehow bought by special interests was “sleazy.” Pence, true to his nice-guy image, wouldn’t go so far as to contradict Sharp’s claim that he was his own person, but he did say that “special interest groups exist to influence Congress.” The two debates found the men often meeting in the political middle. Noting that two-worker families struggled to arrange childcare, Pence wanted the government to help. This was hardly a Republican position. Sharp was critical of labor unions even though they were a central Democratic constituency. Pence tied himself to the most popular politicians in the state, Senators Richard Lugar and Dan Quayle, and to President Reagan. The message was that these were all splendid leaders and Republicans. Since he was a Republican too, he deserved to be elected.
Perhaps it was the vague quality of his argument, or maybe it was his youthful demeanor, but Pence did nothing in his campaign to score points in a way that would help him actually defeat Sharp. Then, with time running out, he began an advertising blitz that delivered two negative messages about Sharp. In one TV ad, a hand filled out a $1 million check on an account held by “Influence Peddlers” and signed with the words D. C. LOBBYISTS. The ad closed with the message, “Mike Pence—nobody’s congressman but yours.”
The second spot was Pence’s own version of the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, which then-Republican candidate for president Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush was using to suggest that his Democratic opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, was soft on crime. William Horton, who never went by Willie, was a black man who committed murder while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The advertisement, which featured an image of a scowling, disheveled Horton, was widely deemed to be racist. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, was proud of the spot and bragged about its effect. The ad’s creator, Larry McCarthy, would say, “The guy looked like an animal” and was “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
Mike Pence’s Horton-style ad was shot in a schoolyard. The video focused on a scary version of a still life: a razor blade, a rolled-up dollar bill, lines of white powder. Red letters bled over the picture, declaring, “There’s something Phil Sharp isn’t telling you about his record on drugs.” The spot ended with the words “It’s weak” written in white powder. The print version of the ad featured a lovely photo of Mike Pence in a jacket and tie, arms folded across his chest, a determined and confident look on his face opposite images of the same props—razor, powder, rolled-up bill. The piece claimed that Sharp was responsible for “1,200 convicted drug pushers … being set free.” Instead of protecting “our children, Phil Sharp has supported the rights of drug pushers.”
Pence’s ad presented no explanation for Phil Sharp’s alleged disregard for children in the war on drugs. Maybe Sharp was well intentioned but wrong on policy. Maybe he was just evil. The reason didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Sharp was trying to hide a weak record. Who had a strong record? Well, Pence couldn’t claim any record at all, because he had never served in any office. However, he had called for the execution of convicted drug “kingpins,” whomever they were, and this proposal was something he repeated often. (Decades later, President Donald Trump would advocate the same policy—execution—for dealers.)
As with all art forms, campaign ads communicate as much with what’s left out as with what’s included. In these two instances, Pence left out the fact that Sharp had received $1 million in PAC money over fourteen years and that his vote on violent offenders had not been against the idea of treating them firmly but in favor of having a committee work on a tough-minded proposal. Sharp was irritated by the blizzard of negative TV spots, which Pence bought at a cost of about $100,000, but they were not enough to tilt the election.
On Election Night, Pence was tantalized by early returns from the most heavily Republican corners of the district, which showed him with a lead of more than thirteen thousand votes. However, as larger cities such as Muncie began to complete their tallies, the balance shifted. At 10:30 P.M., Sharp was so far ahead that Pence called his opponent’s campaign headquarters to congratulate him. Sharp, who had been home playing Monopoly with his wife and two children, wasn’t there. When they finally spoke, both were gracious, but Sharp remained annoyed, telling reporters that many voters he had spoken to had “expressed disgust at all the negativism” coming from his challenger. Pence had a different take. “We didn’t run a negative campaign,” he said. “We’ve run one that was bluntly honest.”
The result, a six-point win for Sharp, came even as the top of the GOP ticket—George Bush and Indiana’s native son Dan Quayle—won the state by twenty points. While Pence was surely frustrated, he resisted those who expressed “condolences” on Election Night. “Nobody’s dead,” he said, a reminder that he had endured his father’s death earlier in the year. Compared with that experience, an election loss was easy. Besides, Pence could take comfort in the fact that he had come closer to beating Sharp than any previous challenger. He also established himself as an attractive candidate who could manage a campaign and stand up to the rigors of the contest. He understood the political capital he had amassed, and so, even on a night when he lost, he declared a victory of sorts. “Nine months ago, I was an unknown lawyer, and nine months later, we were able to convince 100,000 people. I think we just ran out of time.”
* * *
Mike Pence’s 1988 Election Night “ran out of time” line echoed the words of countless coaches and athletes who respond to defeat by saying they were beaten by the timer on the scoreboard. This perspective helps competitors sustain the confidence they need to play the next game. In this instance, Pence immediately began talking about his next run. In the summer of 1989, he went to Washington and met with Lee Atwater himself, who had become chairman of the Republican National Committee on the strength of his success as the architect of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. A notoriously ruthless operative, Atwater was the type of swaggering political hit man who said of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis that he would “strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate.�
� Atwater also understood that the success of the GOP’s so-called Southern Strategy depended on the party’s ability to appeal to the racist underpinnings of white voters.9
Still riding high from the 1988 campaign and eighteen months away from his death from brain cancer at the age of forty, Atwater advised Pence to prepare for a 1990 rematch with Sharp. (In the final months of his life, Atwater began a rapid journey toward repentance, which would culminate in an apology to Michael Dukakis and a public confession that “while I didn’t invent negative politics, I am one of its most ardent practitioners.”) By the fall of 1989, Pence was organizing fund-raisers and acknowledging that he was likely to declare his candidacy. This time around, Pence’s donor list showed that he appealed to the two main factions in conservative politics: right-wing Christians and pro-business activists. Corporate executives, especially those in the government-regulated health care and oil industries, gave generously. Among the religiously motivated were billionaire Richard DeVos, Christian Right campaigner Richard Viguerie, and evangelist Jacqueline Yockey, whose radio station beamed Christian messages to listeners in Israel and neighboring states. Far more strident than the moderates they hoped to supplant, at every level of the GOP, activists in these two camps were becoming more intently engaged in campaigns.
On a national level, major Republican donors, including the DeVos, Koch, and Scaife families, backed Christian Right organizations such as the Family Research Council (FRC) and the Council for National Policy (CNP), which, despite their bland names, advocated radical religiously inspired policies. The CNP, to take just one, was created in 1981 to support “a united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.” Its founder, Rev. Tim LaHaye, accepted that Bible prophecy of the apocalypse was at hand and that a conspiracy of a mythical group called the Illuminati controlled much of world affairs. (His famous “Left Behind” series of books imagined a future when evangelical Christians have been brought to heaven and the people left behind suffer and battle with the Antichrist.) Though it kept its membership private, documents leaked to the press showed the CNF was supported by a who’s who of conservative America.10
The national elements of the religious Right were matched on the state level across the country. In Indiana, the Pence campaign received financial and moral backing from leaders such as Rev. Gene Hood of Independent Nazarene Church, who was part of a growing movement of wealthy, politically conservative Christians. The energy for these activists was different from the traditional evangelizing, gospel-preaching devotion to saving as many souls as possible. Hood, like national leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was an alarmist who used fear to mobilize. This was accomplished by dividing the world into Us and Them and then interpreting changes that brought rights to others, especially gay Americans, as losses for their side. Thus, laws barring discrimination became attacks on conservative Christians’ rights to discrimination on religious grounds. Hood benefited from the privileges of a pastor, living in a church-owned home and enjoying special tax breaks afforded to clergy. He was also a wealthy businessman who owned companies involved in insurance, real estate, radio, and electronics. The insurance company alone took in $25 million in revenue annually.11
In 1986, an assistant pastor at Hood’s church, Rev. Donald Lynch, became one of the first hard-Right neophytes to use provocative social issues to storm the GOP and win an important primary. (He had run against Sharp one cycle before Pence in the general election.) Lynch’s main campaign issue was HIV/AIDS, and he advocated “isolation and quarantine” of people who contracted the virus. He also proposed that cities that failed to forcibly close “bathhouses and pleasure dens” be denied all federal funds. In the May 1986 primary, he knocked off a conventional Republican named Jay Wickliff. Facing Sharp in the general elections, Lynch’s campaign tried to present a more mainstream image, even demanding he not be referred to as “Pastor” or “Reverend.” It didn’t work. Sharp swamped Lynch 62 to 38.12
Lynch’s defeat, combined with losses by others who ran as part of the Indiana religious Right, signaled the limited political appeal of an overtly conservative Christian message. Preaching and protest—rather than running for office—became the focus for activists. No one in Indiana was better known for this kind of action than Lynch’s boss at Independent Nazarene. Rev. Hood was arrested at a clinic where abortions were performed and led a crowd of two hundred that stormed the famous Indiana Roof Ballroom to disrupt the 1988 Miss Gay America pageant. Some demonstrators with him wore surgical masks to signal their fear of HIV/AIDS. Others held Bibles aloft. But the flamboyant Hood issued an extremist warning of violence on behalf of those who could not abide the thought of a national drag queen pageant occurring in their community. He said, “If they try this another time, I’m telling you, there’s going to be bloodshed. We mean business. There are some red-blooded men in Indianapolis, and we won’t stand for this.”13
The pageant protest reflected the local conservative Christian community’s response to changing social mores and a belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was first noted in the gay community, indicated God’s punishment for liberal views on sex in general and homosexuality in particular. Indiana became a focal point for public conflict on HIV/AIDS when Ryan White, a hemophiliac infected via transfusion, was barred from school in Kokomo, Indiana, by officials who didn’t accept the science that showed his presence did not present a health risk to others. The boy’s parents successfully sued the school system, and Ryan White’s condition changed the perspective on HIV/AIDS, no longer a “gay disease.” Though White’s case gained international attention, it did not settle the culture war waged by activists like Hood who, besides speaking out on social issues, gave contributions to Pence and other like-minded politicians.14
Mike Pence began to develop ties with admired national figures on the hard-core libertarian Right, including the billionaire DeVos and Koch families. In addition to unfettered free enterprise, the DeVoses promoted right-wing Christianity. The Kochs were not much interested in religion but pushed libertarian tax and regulation slashing with the zeal of crusaders. As they turned Koch Industries, their father’s oil refining business, into one of the largest privately held companies in the world, they used their billions to build political organizations and support candidates that would shrink government and promote capitalism in its place. Ironically, Fred Koch built his business by making deals in the 1920s and 1930s in the competition-free Soviet Union. His sons David and Charles Koch opposed all regulation, especially all laws that aimed to protect the environment. Not coincidentally, Koch Industries was one of the most prolific polluters in the country and did business so ruthlessly—even cheating sellers in the way crude oil was weighed—that they proved the need for government oversight and regulation.15
In the 1980s, the Kochs’ national political focus extended to state-level organizations, promoting the same doctrine and seeking out candidates who performed according to their agenda. The network they created would eventually function like a shadow political party, nurturing and promoting candidates who challenged regular Republicans and pushed the GOP ever rightward. In Indiana, Mike Pence was an obvious choice.
Pence also attracted the financial and political aid of Charles S. Quilhot, who had cofounded a new organization, the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. The IPR, as it was known, was part of a new wave of state-level political organizations created to promote policies such as the privatization of schools and other government activities, rolling back environmental and business regulation, and lowering taxes. The IPR also provided jobs for people who moved in and out of political campaigns and government. They replicated, on the state level, older national organizations like the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, which, for example, welcomed Indiana businessman/politician Mark Lubbers as he moved between the public and private sectors. Lubbers, in t
urn, donated campaign money to Mike Pence, among others.
IPR’s origin story, told to The Indianapolis Star, described a dozen conservative businessmen gathered like the apostles at a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis, Acapulco Joe’s, to conceive of a way to get more out of a state political system that was already friendly to their interests. Soon, they had engaged one of the nation’s most prominent young conservative agitators, Dinesh D’Souza, as their chief consultant. Not yet thirty years old, D’Souza had gained notoriety as a student at Dartmouth, where he edited a newspaper that outed gay students, mocked African Americans, and parodied mainstream politics. (Unaffiliated with Dartmouth, the paper was supported financially by conservative alumni.) After college, D’Souza had embarked on a high-flying career that had already included a stint at the Heritage Foundation. In 2014, his reputation would be tarnished by a plea of guilty in a case involving violation of campaign laws, even though four years later, in May 2018, Trump singled him out and issued a pardon. But at the time when D’Souza advised the founders of IPR, he was among the most admired conservative activists of his generation. He steered the Acapulco Joe schemers to a conference in California, where the Heritage Foundation taught attendees from around the country how to plant and nourish state-level organizations so a right-wing agenda could be pushed at every level of society. Major foundations in Indiana shied away from IPR, but smaller ones did support the group. One such foundation was a trust organized by an Indiana-based manufacturing firm called Dekko. A Dekko official, Linda Speakman, described IPR’s mission as aligned with its own. “One of our beliefs,” she said, “is that we feel, in a sense, government is our enemy.”16
As with many state think tanks around the country that emerged in the late 1980s, IPR was affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), which was backed with donations from a variety of right-wing foundations, including groups created by Charles and David Koch. Ironically, U.S. law considered such “educational” or “public welfare” nonprofits as tax-exempt. Such free-market, anti-government funders would say they were merely playing by the established rules and would be foolish to do otherwise. At this time, the Kochs and like-minded people with huge sums to invest in politics were creating new initiatives to deliver change that the Republican Party had failed to provide. In general, they wanted to shrink government at all levels, while encouraging profit-driven entities to dominate every other sector of society. A key figure in the SPN was the same Fort Wayne businessman, Byron S. Lamm, who helped create IPR.