Mike Pence — when he first started his path in politics

by Danny Lee, contributor - 11/04/16 4:55 PM ET

I first met Mike Pence in the summer of 1988, when he was running to unseat a longtime incumbent in the 2nd Congressional District in east central Indiana.

Unannounced and unaccompanied, he walked into the small-town daily where I worked and said he was biking through the district. Did I have time to talk politics? I mostly covered drainage board disputes and car-deer mishaps. You bet I had time.

{mosads}Just a dark-haired, stripling lad in his late 20s at the time (like myself), even then he had a smooth pitch, a firm grasp of conservative talking points, and an unintimidated air.

This was surprising, as he was trying to bounce a comfortably entrenched congressman who had been nominating district teens to West Point and attending lunchtime Kiwanis Club meetings for a decade or better.

Pence’s spiel then was that the incumbent, a Watergate-class Democrat named Phil Sharp, was too liberal for the district. He was probably right, given that except for some outposts of labor-oriented Democrat strength in Muncie and New Castle, the district consisted mostly of farmland and small, socially conservative, unlocked-door villages with names like Hope, St. Paul, and Spiceland.

In a sense, his job then was much like his role in these final days of the 2016 presidential campaign — bringing wayward Republicans and conservatives home to the party, reminding them how little they have in common with wonky Washington types — Phil Sharp then, Hillary Clinton now.

He made a good run at it, but was unsuccessful.

In 1990 he tried again, and lost again.

It’s tough to take down an incumbent, but Pence also hurt himself badly by going negative, which interfered with whatever homespun appeal he might have had to the regular folks of the district.

At one point he ran an ad with a mocked-up sheik thanking Sharp in a thick Middle Eastern accent for his approach to U.S. energy policy. It probably played well as off-color comedy at The Cow Palace in Shelbyville or the Corner Restaurant in Rushville, but poorly in living rooms around the district, where manners can be subtly but meaningfully different.

And then it came out that he used campaign contributions for personal expenses — legal at the time, but embarrassing, especially for a fiscal conservative.

By that time I was doing political coverage for a larger paper in Columbus, Indiana. We dutifully ran stories on all of this, along with the more substantive material the campaign was producing.

I remember taking notes as Mike, his staff (he had staff by then) and I picked our way carefully through a farmer’s hog building in northern Bartholomew County. He kept his shoes clean and spoke convincingly, in detail, and with clarity about how reducing capital gains taxes wasn’t just of interest to wealthy industrialists.

Unfortunately, that kind of thing is hard to package for ordinary voters. As I recall I was the only reporter who showed up

On election night the results weren’t pretty. His seven-point loss two years before ballooned to 19 points. His party at Jonathan Byrd’s Restaurant in Greenwood, south of Indianapolis, broke up early.

Just a day or two after the election I bumped into him at the Greenwood Park Mall. We were upstairs in the homewares section of the Lazarus Department Store. I was following my wife around, as Hoosier husbands do, keeping an eye peeled for the Lay-Z-Boy and television department. I think he was doing the same.

I asked him if he thought the negative tone of the campaign had hurt him. (I carried a notebook everywhere then).

The long, exhausting and, in the end, humiliating campaign was over, possibly taking Pence’s political career with it. He was a young man with a family and few prospects. There would have been no apparent downside in telling me to buzz off, or worse.

Instead he graciously answered questions as other shoppers wandered by eyeing us curiously. Yes, he said, in retrospect the tone of his campaign was too negative, and amounted to a disservice to the good people of the district. No, he had no excuses to offer. He wasn’t explicitly apologetic, but he didn’t seem to resent being called to account – even standing there next to the Lazarus collection of gravy boats, punch bowls and some holiday nutcrackers.

My notes are long gone, but Pence later wrote an extended mea culpa titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” in which he said, “(A) campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate. That means your First Amendment rights end at the tip of your opponent’s nose.”

He parlayed the whole experience and that chastened philosophy into a very successful talk-radio gig in which he presented himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” offering a conservatism with a backbone that middle-of-the-road Republicans seemed to lack, but without the bitter caterwauling of the angry Right.

This turned out to be the correct tone. He won a congressional seat in 2000 (after the Republican incumbent gave it up to run for governor) and climbed the GOP leadership ladder through several terms, eventually unsuccessfully challenging John Boehner for minority leader, calling for a return the conservative values of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.”

He won an Indiana gubernatorial race and — except for a misstep with an initiative opposing gay marriage that inflamed the LGBT community — managed to stay largely non-controversial, but not ideology free.

Now a historic election could well depend on how well Pence has presented the human face of conservatism and the Republican Party, playing good cop to Donald Trump’s Bad Lieutenant and drawing the poison of Trump’s often venomous id–driven campaign.

He’s done well. Especially in the debate against Tim Kaine, he looked firm but polite and restrained as Kaine badgered, interrupted and tried to provoke him into a Trump-style flare-up.

Of course, Pence is no George H.W. Bush, merrily twinkling with a thousand points of light. He’s a committed conservative — much more so than Trump. He only looks tame next to Trump’s ravening beast — Dr. Jekyll titrating the formulae while Mr. Hyde wrecks the lab.

As we wait to see what happens, I keep thinking back to that careful walk through the farmer’s hog building back in 1990. Who knew it would turn out to be such an apt metaphor for his role in a Trump campaign nearly thirty years later — working hard to get the conservative message out without getting spattered with something unpleasant?

Will he end up at the vice president’s quarters at the Naval Observatory in D.C.? Or should I look for him at the mall again?

Danny Lee was a reporter for five years, eventually covering politics and the Indiana statehouse for The Columbus Republic newspaper. From 1994 to 2009 he was the editor of a nationally circulated children’s magazine, during which time he also did freelance travel items, book reviews, and op-eds.

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