Pence and his interesting past. Is this a Keep Your Friends Close, and your Enemies Closer type relationship?
Pence installed allies to head the CIA and the Department of Health and Human Services and the Medicare and Medicaid systems. He elevated a fellow Republican governor to become the envoy to the United Nations and another to run the Energy Department. He camped out on cable TV to make the incoming Administration’s case. His goal, as the right hand to a man he once opposed–and still disagrees with on tactics and tone–is to become invaluable. “I don’t think Donald knew him very well,” former House Speaker John Boehner says of Trump’s running mate. “But he has found out over these last four months that he made a much better decision than he realized.”
But then, this isn’t the first time Michael Richard Pence, 57, who grew up in a middle-class Democratic house where his family displayed pictures of John F. Kennedy, has surprised. His path has never followed a straight line. He arrived on Indiana’s Hanover College campus in 1977 as a fairly typical young person: somewhat liberal, open-minded and curious about what lay beyond his experiences at the St. Columba parish in Columbus, Ind., where he spent at least six days a week as an altar boy.
Is he just "acting" like a Christian?
Pence launched a scrappy first campaign, riding his single-speed bicycle across the district, but the thing Hoosiers remember more than his glad-handing is his stomach for negative ads. One flyer featured a picture of rolled-up cash, razor blades and white powder that looked like cocaine. There’s something Phil Sharp isn’t telling you about his record on drugs, it read. On the next page, spelled out in fauxcaine: it’s weak.
Pence lost by more than 6 percentage points. He tried again two years later, with another viciously negative strategy. In one Pence ad, a man dressed in Arab garb thanked Sharp for keeping the U.S. reliant on Mideast oil. Pence supporters posed as members of an environmental group and called neighbors to tell them, incorrectly, that Sharp was turning his family farm into a nuclear-waste dump. Pence, who claimed not to know about the scheme, would later recognize the calls as “a manifestly dumb idea.”
In the end, only 42% of voters backed him, and Pence went home a deeply disappointed man with a guilty conscience. As penance, he wrote Sharp an apology letter and later published a manifesto against negative campaigns. “Christ Jesus came to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all,” Pence wrote, quoting Scripture. These “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner” became a guiding principle for his future campaigns, still a decade away, and the next step of his career as a conservative policy thinker and talk-radio host. In an era of red-meat radio, Pence cast himself as a calmer alternative, “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” he said. The remake worked, allowing him to finally win the House seat in 2000.
Seems Pence is only about Pence, and not really about what is right for the country.
In 2006, Pence tried to midwife an immigration bill that would have offered a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. The plan won applause from Bush, who invited him to the White House to give his effort some juice. Conservatives called it a betrayal, and the bill never got off the ground.
Even so, Pence caught the eye of party bigwigs. Boehner, then the Republican leader, gave him minor tasks to test both his competence and his loyalty. Pence passed, and in late 2008, Boehner phoned Pence and urged him to throw his name into the race for the No. 3 spot in the GOP leadership, chairman of the House Republican conference. “Really?” came Pence’s reply. “Can I call you back?”
Boehner says Pence called him back an hour later and said he would do it. “It was one of the best decisions I made,” Boehner says. “Pence and his team were constant sources of support and good counsel.”
Long article. Read more.
https://time.com/4606111/mike-pence-is-no-ordinary-wingman/