Free marketeers were generally wary and had no interest in the religious goals of the Christian Right. Libertarians were especially resistant to the religious movement’s efforts to police sex and reproduction and had no interest in funding protests and marches against abortion or gay rights. They chose instead to fund think tanks and writers who could produce position papers and contribute to journals. Pence immediately began to cultivate both sides. He certainly wanted to outlaw abortion and aligned with groups that wanted to limit gay rights. Yet he was also the son of a successful businessman and the product of Columbus, a company town that gave him connections to industry. Pence’s background appealed to entrepreneurs and capitalists. He won campaign support from Cummins, which was based in Columbus, and from other major Indiana firms, including American Lawn Mower and the giant drug-maker Eli Lilly and Company, whose executives flocked to give him campaign cash.
Drug and health care executives would, over time, become essential to Pence’s fund-raising efforts. Heavily regulated by the government and also extremely profitable, these industries were often maligned for price gouging but also protected from the kind of government action that would rein in prices. The ultimate example of this dynamic would come in 2003 when a Republican Congress and president created a new drug benefit program for seniors on Medicare and simultaneously barred the government from negotiating on prices. This move destroyed buyers’ power in the typical marketplace relationship and meant that no discounts could be had for the massive volume of purchases made by Medicare. The price set by the sellers was the price paid, and profits soared at the companies where execs were such loyal political donors. In his political life, assorted drug companies, health care firms, and people working in these fields would give Pence more than $400,000 in campaign contributions. Tony Moravec, owner of Blairex Laboratories and Applied Laboratories, based in Columbus, Indiana, would eventually give Pence more than $430,000. (Among the companies’ biggest-selling products were an ointment called Boudroux’s Butt Paste and Encare, a spermicidal suppository.)17
In 1990 and later, Pence also received donations from politically connected corporate lawyers, including Tom Huston of the powerful firm Barnes & Thornburg, which had become briefly famous during the Watergate scandal for drawing up a plan to use criminal means—burglary, illegal surveillance, tampering with mail—against President Nixon’s political foes. With money coming in greater volume than it had in 1988, Pence engaged in some questionable financial arrangements, which led to one of his biggest mistakes in the 1990 election rematch with Phil Sharp.18
Pence took the unusual step of creating two campaign organizations to accept donations. One—the Mike Pence for Congress Committee—was an ordinary nonprofit. The other—People for Mike Pence Inc.—was set up as a business that was able to take out loans and make payments, including personal payments for his own use. Reporters found that this entity had made payments on Pence’s personal credit card bills and mortgage, for the loan on his wife’s car, and paid for groceries, parking tickets, and golf outings. Sharp pounced on the issue, demanding local prosecutors investigate possible campaign law violations.
The candidate’s formation of a for-profit committee, which was legal but controversial, caught Pence’s campaign manager, Sherman Johnson, by surprise. Years later, he would recall, “That was something Mike did completely on his own. I think only two people in the campaign knew about it.” When the issue arose, Pence responded with a testy “I need to make a living.” His aides then stepped in, saying that the candidate’s openness about the campaign company signaled it was an aboveboard enterprise. And, in fact, there was nothing illegal about it. However, the controversy deprived Pence of the advantage he believed he held when it came to campaign finance and gave Sharp something to talk about for months.
In this rematch of their 1988 contest, Pence looked noticeably older.His brown hair had started to turn gray, and he now wore glasses. He put his bicycle away but maintained his commitment to direct contact with voters. He used a counting device to keep track of the number of hands he shook. His goal of one hundred per day was modest considering he would need the support of about seventy-five thousand people to win. Voters who questioned Pence on his priorities heard the same list he offered in 1988, only the candidate was a bit more strident. This time, he wasn’t just opposed to abortion; he advocated an amendment to the Constitution, except in cases of rape and incest or when a pregnancy endangers a woman’s life. He opposed the Clean Air Act, which regulated emissions from vehicles and industry, and favored a permanent ban on deficit spending, even though many economists support it when used, for example, to stimulate the economy during recession.
Among Pence’s other positions were many GOP standards, including reductions in the federal estate tax and a rollback on the capital gains tax. During a debate, Sharp reached for the name of a famous plutocrat to criticize his economic ideas. “Donald Trump will be delighted to hear your commitment,” said Sharp, “because 80 percent of the capital gains tax [reduction] will go to people who make $100,000 a year.”19
Although their policy differences were real, once more, the candidates did not attract the kind of attention that might come with more dramatic issues. Determined to avoid a second defeat, Pence began to play rough. In early March 1990, he argued that Sharp was akin to an oligarch “choosing to be part of a system that gives control of our government to just a few inside special interests and takes power away from the people.” At the end of the month, he said his opponent was selling out his constituents. “While we in central Indiana need honest, decent representation, Sharp has gone off and left us to get the money these groups dole out.”
Sharp had been prepared for a tough fight and was more assertive than he had been in 1988. From the start, he tried to tie Pence to unpopular out-of-state Republicans and to the consultant Ed Rollins, who came in from Washington to help Pence. He crowed about Pence’s fund-raising prowess and said that Pence had raised more money from donors than any Republican challenger in the country. (With the aid of informal groups like Auto Dealers for Pence, he had pulled ahead of Sharp in contributions.) Rollins was known as a political streetfighter in the style of Lee Atwater, but he did not appear to lay heavy hands on the Pence-Sharp race. “It wasn’t a campaign directed by consultants without the candidate’s input,” said Sherman Johnson. “It was dirty; it was a campaign that had consultant input. And … the final decision was made by Mike.” Undoubtedly, Mike’s closest advisor, Sherman said, was Karen. “They do make a terrific team,” he said.
The dirt began flying when Pence accused Sharp of planning to sell a family farm in Illinois that could be a future nuclear waste depository. (Pence raised the issue in broadcast ads and with mailers featuring green cows.) The property at issue wasn’t far from the Illinois border with Indiana, and thus Pence implied that Sharp was risking the health and safety of those who lived nearby. The truth was that Sharp didn’t own the farm and was not involved with it. The land was subject to a possible forced sale under eminent domain, as federal authorities were eyeing the area for a waste repository. The development never came to pass.
When the farm story failed to excite voters, Pence’s team went lower, developing a TV ad that was remembered decades later. It became almost an opening self-defining explanation when someone asked Indiana politicians or journalists about Mike Pence. “Well, do you know about the sheik?”
The “sheik” was a robe-wearing figure in sunglasses posed before a desert backdrop. When he spoke, he excitedly credited the incumbent congressman with rising sales of Arab oil to the United States, which were making him rich. “Thank you, Phil Sharp,” he said. Arab American groups condemned the ad as an ethnic slur. Sharp ran his own TV spot, saying, “Mike Pence’s negative TV ads about Phil Sharp are not true.“In response, Pence’s campaign manager said the sheik ad was supposed to be regarded as a joke. “It’s delivered with a degree of comedy,” said Sherman Johnson as he refused to stop running it. This d
ecision only increased the animosity between the two camps. When aides to the candidates found themselves at the same campaign stop, they got into a shouting match that escalated to pushing and shoving.
In retrospect, the 1990 version of Pence might be regarded as a boxer who knew he was losing and desperately threw some low blows. Two days before the election, the district was flooded with automated phone calls, which delivered a recorded message saying that a group called the Martinsville Environmental League was so outraged by the Phil Sharp farm-sale issue that it had switched its endorsement and was backing Pence. Just as there was no effort by Sharp to aid the development of a waste site, the Martinsville Environmental League did not exist. Sherman Johnson told reporters that, as far as he knew, his campaign had nothing to do with the calls, which came from a telemarketing outfit in Utah called Matrixx Stats. (Actually, the calls were recommended by a national GOP consultant and arranged by associates of Republican U.S. senator Dan Coats, whose campaign paid for them. The two aides who arranged them were fired.) Johnson also said that published polls showing Sharp with an insurmountable lead were wrong.
On Election Day, the Pence team sent a life-size model of a mother elephant with her baby careening around the district on a trailer pulled by a pickup truck. The idea was to soften the candidate’s image after months of mudslinging. It didn’t work. Sharp trounced Pence, winning with 60 percent of the vote. For the first time, he actually won Pence’s home area, Bartholomew County, where a five thousand–vote swing indicated that voters were turned off by the Mike Pence they got to know the second time around. In the moments after his defeat was announced, Pence seemed defensive, saying, “I don’t think our campaign ever had a choice but to go straight at Phil Sharp.”
Eight months later, Pence reversed himself, publishing a document unique to Indiana politics. Titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” it noted that “the mantra of a modern political campaign is ‘drive up the negatives,’” where an opponent is concerned. Pence said this was wrong because “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—even in the matter of political rhetoric.”
The other points Pence made in this public confession included acknowledging that “a campaign ought to be about the advancement of issues whose success or failure is more significant than that of the candidate.” This kind of campaign would create a lasting “foundation of arguments” whether a candidate wins or loses. The main personal failing Pence noted was his embrace of a winning-is-everything notion. “Negative campaigning is born of that trap.”
Although many considered the brief essay to be an apology, it was not. Instead, it was a “confession” of the sort that religiously oriented people would understand as a “declaration” rather than a mea culpa. Like a confession of faith, Pence’s statement announced he favored positive political messaging and not attack dog–style campaigning. And though he said that, in general, “negative campaigning is wrong,” he didn’t describe his own specific transgressions. More remarkably, he argued, like a boy who says “The other guy hit me first,” that Democrats were worse offenders than Republicans. This was, said Pence, because GOP voters expect their side to be “above that sort of thing.” The implication was that if Pence had won, he would not have ever written the confession.
The better option suggested in Pence’s declaration would come from those who campaign simply to advance certain ideas, with personal victory remaining a lesser goal. He wrote, “But one day soon the new candidates will step forward, faces as fresh as the morning and hearts as brave as the dawn. This breed will turn away from running ‘to win’ and toward running ‘to stand.’ And its representatives will see the inside of as many offices as their party will nominate them to fill.”20
In his prediction, Pence laid out for himself the identity he might craft and bring back to the political arena. In the meantime, Phil Sharp considered the document to be the self-serving kind of thing offered by people who offend and seek forgiveness before actual repentance because they just can’t bear to admit their sins. This was consistent with the man Sharp described, years later, as “Indiana nice.” By this, he meant to indicate a person “who won’t take the last cookie on the plate but will stab you in the back.” Pence was, in Sharp’s estimate, profoundly and personally ambitious.
The Christianity Sharp observed in Pence wasn’t the humble, turn-the-other-cheek sort. Instead, said Sharp, “Pence believes that God is on his side.” The most troubling aspect of this belief, he added, was that Pence “can tolerate any amount of darkness to get his way.”
4
LIMBAUGH LIGHT
Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet.
—Isaiah 58:1
In 1991, Mike Pence, two-time election loser, was looking for something new to do with his time. Other defeated congressional candidates would return to their prior work in business or a profession, but Pence had no particular interest in practicing law, which was what he had trained to do. He lacked the standing to land a teaching gig (another common choice for defeated politicians), and nothing in his experience suggested he was qualified to work in government. Pence was left looking for some other way for him to stay true to the career mantra of his generation— “Do what you love”—and to make a livelihood out of work that he could enjoy.
What Mike Pence enjoyed was arguing. This didn’t mean he liked to fight, although he had shown he would make verbal attacks when necessary. What he preferred was to charm and persuade, and he was good at it. Like a kid who learns in Little League that he can hit a baseball better than most grown men, Pence had found his preternatural public speaking talent in the high school debate club. And, unlike athletes, who rarely get much better after they become adults, Pence possessed skills that could be developed for decades to come. It was his good fortune to find himself adrift and looking for somewhere to attach himself at a time when a great effort was being made to create comfortable homes for well-spoken young conservatives.
By 1991, foundations and wealthy individuals had nearly completed the construction of an alternative infrastructure for the development of people and arguments to advance an agenda of low taxes, deregulation, curtailed government, and Christian Right morality. Conceived to oppose colleges and universities, which were considered irredeemably biased against conservative thought, these institutions ranged from nationally oriented centers such as the Heritage Foundation to dozens of state and local groups scattered around the country. Year after year, donors kept these think tanks operating with millions of dollars. Corporate backers represented the tobacco, drug, and technology industries, among others. Family foundations included the names DeVos, Coors, Olin, Scaife, and Koch.
The conservative organizations funded writers and researchers—many were given academic-sounding titles such as “distinguished fellow”—who generally devoted themselves to completing manuscripts that supported preset policy goals. Among the notions spawned in these places, the granddaddy of them all was “supply side” economics, which found little support among economists but justified such policy prescriptions as tax cuts for the rich, which also happened to benefit the wealthy and big business. (Put simply, this theory suggests that rather than dampen prices, abundance stimulates demand, so tax cuts would rev up the economy. This is the opposite of what happens in the real world, where once buyers have what they want, they close their wallets.) The salesmanship practiced by the institutes that distributed papers backing supply-side economics and other partisan ideas reduced policy to a matter of marketing, with victory going to the argument packaged with the right slogan and adequate budget.1
At the national and local levels, the think tanks were filled with young people who were groomed for lifelong service to conservative causes and somewhat older men and women who used them as temporary homes when they were between campaigns or jobs in government. Mike Pence fit into both categories and
within weeks of losing the 1990 election got a position as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. Funded by many of the same benefactors who supported the national organizations, IPR claimed to commission studies but more typically funded political broadsides. As a Republican budget expert told The Indianapolis Star, “They’ve thrown out some ideas, but so far, everything’s fairly loose.” When Pence took over, the review operated with a budget of $200,000 per year. Its main activities were publishing a journal and submitting articles to newspapers. In general, the group favored businesses and Republicans and opposed Democrats, unions, and government agencies.
The position at IPR required that Pence oversee the operation of the foundation and serve as its principal cheerleader. Friendly and soft-spoken, Pence excelled as a promoter. Within two years, he increased funding to $500,000. During the same time, the little institute gained wider notice in the press and greater influence in the state capitol. Much of this progress was due to Pence’s mild but also determined advocacy, which sometimes required a bit of debate club trickery. When a critic noted that the IPR pledged to “exalt the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially those concerning the interrelated freedoms of religion, enterprise, and speech” though none of these truths are referenced in the declaration, Pence was steadfast in defense. “We talk about the freedoms of the Declaration, not in the Declaration,” he said. Such sophistry was nonsense.
The Shadow President Page 8