Former Vice President Mike Pence
On Saturday in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition gathering, former Indiana Governor and Vice President Mike Pence announced that he is quitting the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Adam Wren a favorite of ours wrote about Pence’s announcement for Politico:
With donations sagging, the former vice president, who often made self-deprecating remarks about his middle-class finances, had recently ponied up $150,000 of his own relatively small, newly-acquired fortune, amassed from a two-book deal and speaking fees, to prop up his campaign.
It wasn’t anywhere close to enough. For months, virtually no pollster or political prognosticator saw his campaign gaining traction in a GOP that prized id over ideology, presentation over pedigree.
Just a little less than two weeks before on October 15th, Wren had written an article about how Pence’s campaign was having financial troubles Wren had reported at the time that:
Mike Pence’s presidential campaign is running on fumes, reporting just $1.2 million cash on hand and more than $600,000 in debt.
The former vice president raised $3.3 million in the third quarter, he reported Sunday (October 15th). He has given himself $150,000 — a significant figure for a politician who has spent much of his life having never amassed much wealth, and one that far exceeds the less-than-six-figure salary he earned when he was Indiana governor less than a decade ago.
Given that Pence had failed to make much traction either in the polls and with fundraising we were not too surprised to hear that he decided to drop out of the race. We thought he would be either foolish enough or delusional enough to stay in until Iowa, obviously we were mistaken. It would appear that money and polling played a factor in Pence’s decision to quit, but we are fairly certain that he was pressured to do so. Probably by various GOP donors, officials, possibly close friends and family also helped make up his mind. Some of the Never Trump community expressed the belief that Pence’s inability to gain traction is a further sign of how badly the GOP has gotten under Donald Trump, and that Pence’s unwillingness to try to help Trump stay in office after losing the 2020 election doomed his chances.
We don’t deny there is some truth to that, but we don’t believe that was the primary reason his candidacy failed. His campaign went nowhere because Pence could not provide a rationale for why he should be President. He tried to say that the country needed to take a different direction than the one offered by Donald Trump, but at the same time kept saying how proud he was of the work he had done in the Trump-Pence administration. So if he was really proud of the work he had done in the Trump administration why was he running against Trump? Or if he wanted to offer an alternative to Trump why should voters pick him as opposed to one of the other candidates? Also having been Trump’s chief flunky as Vice President gave Anti-Trump Republicans no reason to trust Pence with being in the White House. Or as Reagan would have said Pence offered “Pale pastels instead of bold colors”. Meaning he failed to offer any significant distinction between himself and Trump.
Yes Pence did agree to certify the election results, but he had no legal choice but to do so, and he had spent the previous two months being evasive on what he would do. He tried to find ways to do what Trump wanted but failed. If Pence had just come out forcefully from the beginning and said clearly that he and Trump had lost a lot of what went on during January 6th could have been avoided. Instead Pence waffled and waited until the last possible minute before saying clearly that he was powerless to overturn the election results. Pence knew full well that he couldn’t change the results but he stupidly thought he could placate Trump, instead the Frankenstein monster he helped create almost got him killed.
If God forbid that Trump gets the nomination we would be shocked if Pence doesn’t immediately endorse Trump. So to our fellow Never Trumper’s don’t shed any tears over o Pence’s withdrawal from the race. The man made his deal with the devil and now he must reap the consequences of his actions.
