Since Mike Pence is reportedly a devout believer in the miraculous, perhaps he can go ask his version of God for a miracle or two, because that’s what it’s going to take to get the man into any kind of serious contention for the 2024 election. Everybody from Reagan consultant Stuart Spencer to Trump pardonee Steve Bannon has pronounced Pence’s run for the GOP nomination in 2024 dead on arrival. The reason? He’s got no constituency. As Spencer summed it up, “The Trump people don’t like him, and all the people who were anti-Trump don’t like him.” Umm….who does that leave? Politico:
“MAGA is maniacally focused on 3 November, and they understand Pence betrayed them,” said Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump as he left the White House. “He is being shunned and erased from the MAGA movement, and it hasn’t even started.”
He said, “Mike Pence’s political career is over … It’s done.” […]
Three years before an election — and especially for someone with Pence’s name recognition and expansive donor and political network — no campaign is irredeemable. But not since another former vice president from Indiana, Dan Quayle, ran for president in 2000, has such a prominent Republican politician’s pre-presidential campaign seemed more forlorn.
“I really like him,” said Carmine Boal, a former Iowa state representative who chairs the Northside Conservatives group in Ankeny. But Pence, she said, just doesn’t have “the wow factor.”
“You have to have something that just reaches out and grabs people where they’re at,” she said. “Pence just seems a little cool and removed.” […]
“He’s got to justify to the Trumpistas why he isn’t Judas Iscariot, and then he’s got to demonstrate to a bunch of other Republicans why he hung out with someone they perceive to be a nutjob,” said Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and on several presidential campaigns.
Describing Pence as “caught in between” those competing factions, Walsh said, “I just think it is an awfully tough, tough hill for him to climb.”
After hecklers greeted Pence at the Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Florida last month, organizers of a speaker series in one early nominating state decided to hold off on inviting him. They were sympathetic to Pence, but fearful he’d be embarrassed by a similar reception there, according to a source involved in the decision.
Where Pence fails to read the room properly here, is that by the normal playbook of politics, yes, a vice president, particularly one associated with a successful administration, stands a very good chance of being nominated for president and then elected. We see that precept demonstrated in the current administration as we speak.
But Pence is not a part of any normal playbook or successful administration. Pence was the sidekick of the most extravagant failure in politics, presidential or otherwise, in our history. Pence drove the clown car for P.T. Barnum. Pence was Ed McMahon to an insurrectionist who incited the worst violence the Capitol had seen since 1814. And he seriously thinks he’s going to divorce himself from all that? Seriously? He’s going to make the Trump administration play out like Eisenhower or Reagan?
I guess it takes what it takes for reality to sink in. Pence should just gracefully recede and write his books. Or, he can keep polling at one percent for a while longer.
Because things are not going to get any easier for Pence, they’re going to get tougher. Trump has only one plank in his platform and that is that the election was stolen and no matter which way the political winds blow, the weather vane is always going to point to Mike Pence.
Trump may not seriously run for office in 2024. He may not be able to, due to legal problems or he may simply not want to. He didn’t like the job. He’s only going to start campaigning for the money and the limelight. But there is no way he’s going to suddenly come out in favor of his former V.P. It won’t happen. And that would be the only way Pence could seriously compete.
This isn’t a showbiz breakup like Sonny and Cher, where both parties had what it took to go it alone. No, Trump has characterized Pence as his kryptonite. Can you see kryptonite become a superhero and succeeding Superman? No. And you won’t.
First, at any showtime for Pence, some designated crew person needs to check to see if he has a pulse … Pence was always present at the Trump rants, but seemed to be catching a few zzz’s as well … his speaking voice was enough to almost force catatonic listeners …
He is a good shepherd for the common house fly, totally unaware there may be telltale fly specs amongst that snow white hair …
Ha, president Pence? Another horror movie comes to mind …
Pence wasn’t wanted in Indiana any more. He failed there, too.
Pence is right out of Central Casting for the TV role of being the presiding Funeral Director at Trump’s wake and funeral. That’s the only role left for him on the political stage. His inability to accept that is both sad and funny as hell. It’s like the spot where unbearable, awful sadness and slapstick Benny Hill style comedy get sent around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN at near light speed and crash into each other. New, never known or seen particles get created putting on a unique show. Only in this case it doesn’t take special instruments to see them!
“This isn’t a showbiz breakup like Sonny and Cher, where both parties had what it took to go it alone.”
Really? You think Sonny “had what it took to go it alone?” After their 1975 divorce, Cher continued having some success as a performer but kind of turned into tabloid fodder for several years before getting a second career as an actress in the early 80s (first on Broadway in “Welcome Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean. Jimmy Dean” and then the big screen with films like “Silkwood,” “Mask,” “The Witches of Eastwick” and her Oscar-winning performance in “Moonstruck”) and then, in the middle of that acting career came her big music comeback (and, of course, that petered out after about 5 years before making another star turn with “Believe” and she’s spent most of the last 20 years on a seemingly endless “Farewell Tour”). But Sonny? He got a few minor acting gigs, mostly TV guest roles and a couple of minor film roles but all relatively insignificant beyond the “Hey! That’s Sonny Bono” factor. And if he hadn’t been upset over the bureaucracy when he tried opening a restaurant, he’d have largely gone down in history as a very insignificant trivia point instead of launching his political career as Mayor of Palm Springs and then becoming a member of the US House of Representatives.