Smith’s political background and Christian Right beliefs made him an ideal person to advise a candidate who wanted to blend politics and religion to win votes. When Smith accepted the job of campaign manager he signaled to all other Republicans that Pence was the front-runner. The first competition among the potential candidates involved the scramble for campaign money. In the early going, the man or woman who amasses the biggest war chest looks like the one with the most power, and this creates a kind of momentum.
Candidates generally insist that their political positions and votes are not for sale and that people who fund their campaigns are simply backing the one who already supports their priorities. No one in politics believes this is true, which is why, in 1988 and 1990, Pence made a big deal out of Phil Sharp’s habit of accepting donations from political action committees. Everyone knows that committees and individuals give to gain access and influence. Pence’s first campaigns were funded mainly by businesspeople—many from local industries like Cummins Engine—who had their own interests, but they were harder to discern than the goals of a PAC named for a labor group, a commercial association, or policy priority. Nevertheless, the donors would make their wishes clear, and it would be understood that future support depended on performance.
After nearly a decade of making connections as Radio Mike, Pence knew the big players who could give and also connect him to others who would make donations. However, no one can function as both the chief fund-raiser and the candidate for a campaign. Pence relied on an Indiana-based manufacturing executive, Kelly Stanley, to guide fund-raising. Kelly was also vice chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce. He raised $100,000 in a single month at the end of 1999.
At about this time, Pence interviewed with a key national political action committee called the Club for Growth that had been created with the aid of the Koch brothers’ political machine and advised about 1,500 wealthy donors, a number of whom were Wall Street investors. Most of these people had never met Mike Pence or any of the other candidates they were backing, but they agreed with the club’s priorities—tax cuts and deregulating business—and were guided by its endorsements. They sent checks to the organization, which in turn sent them to campaigns in twice-monthly Federal Express shipments. For example, in 2000, first-time candidate for Congress Jeff Flake said that every two weeks as much as $15,000 just arrived at his doorstep in Arizona in the form of checks from people he didn’t know. This terrified moderate incumbent Republicans who understood that the club used primary elections to oust GOPers who were insufficiently right-wing. As founder Stephen Moore would say in 2003, “We say we’re going to run someone against them, and they start wetting their pants.”4
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Candidates who wanted Club for Growth’s money appeared at gatherings where they were inspected like political livestock. They were quizzed about their positions, and their appearance and speaking style were examined with an eye toward their abilities as campaigners. One of the participants in 1999, who had been on Pence’s radio show in Indiana, would recall that Pence “wowed the audience.” At the time, the organization was smarting from Republican president George H. W. Bush’s tax hike, which was made despite his “read my lips” promise to never raise federal revenues. Founder Moore, who considered politicians “cowards” at heart, wanted to scare those who were Republicans into becoming extremists when it came to cutting taxes and regulation to favor business and investors. He was so uninterested in social issues that he banned the word abortion from club meetings and so determined that when he went after one senator, he said he wanted a “scalp on the wall.”
In the 2000 election, the men and women of Moore’s club wanted to help elect members of Congress who would resist the gravitational pull of the middle ground of politics where, historically, the spirit of compromise led to policy. From their perspective, the game in Washington was a win-or-lose affair, and they were willing to pay for victory. However, this required candidates who were more than committed to the cause. They needed to be persuasive, presentable, and personable. In other words, they needed to be like Mike Pence. After he appeared for inspection, Pence was selected to be one of ten newcomers favored by the club. Two of the members were Ric Keller of Florida and Scott Garrett of New Jersey, who, like Pence, were clean-cut men with law degrees, brilliant smiles, and a gift for public speaking. Like him, they were also fervently opposed to both abortion rights and the legalization of same-sex marriages.
With the club’s acceptance, Pence and the others became eligible to receive shipments of checks. Pence would eventually receive a bit more than $3,100 from a Club for Growth account and an additional $62,400 in checks that the club collected from its members and forwarded to him. PACs representing tobacco companies, financial firms, auto dealers, and others filled his coffers with what would eventually be more than $1 million. Pence’s list of contributors would include stalwarts of the Christian Right like Amway heir Richard DeVos and J. Patrick Rooney of the insurance company Golden Rule Financial, who compared his conflicts with regulators to Jesus Christ’s preaching. “Jesus was put to death not for his miracle,” noted Rooney, “but for his criticism of those in power.” Rooney advocated replacing government health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid with private insurance.
In his part of Indiana, Pence got money from Cummins executives, including his own brother Edward. High-level people at Conseco donated. Among them was another brother, Thomas J. Pence, who had been hired by the high-flying Stephen Hilbert’s firm. Many contributions came from the wealthy Rose family of Indianapolis, including two checks from Thomas Rose, publisher of The Jerusalem Post in Israel. Rose shared Pence’s adamant positions against abortion and gay rights. He said that English should be made “the official language of the United States” and imagined there was a “secular assault on God” taking place in American society.
While Rose and others stood for certain religious values, the libertarian movement was represented in the Pence campaign by the likes of T. Alan Russell of the Indianapolis-based Liberty Fund. The fund used its $300 million endowment to back candidates, treat judges to vacations and seminars, and publish books like the works of Ludwig von Mises. A twentieth-century economic theorist who found a limited number of followers in his profession, von Mises was made into a hero by anti-government businesspeople and politicians who held that the unfettered pursuit of wealth produced the best result for society.5
Ludwig von Mises would have regarded the Pence campaign’s fund-raising as an effective form of political capitalism. The candidate had identified his market, supplied the promise of his ideology, and netted much more than the national average for congressional races. In Indiana, where everything from advertising to office space came at a discount compared with the coasts, the money meant he could blanket the airwaves with ads. In the Republican primary, his advantages helped him sail to victory when voters cast their ballots in early May. The Democratic Party nominated Bob Rock, a former Marine and a successful lawyer, as their candidate. Rock was a political newcomer whose reputation, one voter noted, was marked by his inherent “kindness.” Hard-pressed to match Pence in any of the campaign arts, from stump speeches to fund-raising, his entire campaign would be run with a little less than $380,000.6
As Pence turned to the general election, his campaign team built a website where they presented “The Pence Agenda: A Guide to Restoring the American Dream.” The agenda was fourteen pages of bullet-pointed directions for congressional actions. Of the eleven points collected under the headline “Restoring Moral Integrity,” ten referenced abortion. One point was a call for a constitutional amendment to make the procedure illegal nationwide. The eleventh item called for a ban on physician-assisted suicide. Pence made mention of no other moral issues, but elsewhere in this document he called for policies to favor two-parent families and to ban marriage for anyone but heterosexual couples. He also asked that federal funds go to groups devoted to changing the sexual behavior of gay people.
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If the Pence moral agenda seemed to have been written by Catholic bishops, and it did, other parts of the document could have been cribbed from PowerPoint presentations made at meetings of the Club for Growth. Pence called for tax cuts and more treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement, which promoted open global markets. (Among his ideas was a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas that would span the Western Hemisphere.) He promised to support all the items pushed by the Club for Growth and others who wanted government functions shifted to profit-making businesses, and he sounded an alarm about federal debt, which at the time stood at $5.6 trillion—a little less than 60 percent of the gross domestic product.
All of Pence’s business and economic positions were standard GOP issue. The arguments for them were many years old and once memorized could be offered in succinct portions. Where he strayed was in the emphasis he put on social issues. Noting the “cultural primacy” of the “two-parent family,” he opposed civil rights protections for gay Americans and promised to fight funding for any AIDS programs that “celebrate and encourage” same-sex relationships. This language reflected a rhetorical twist often used in the conservative Christian world, where many considered AIDS God’s punishment for sin and regarded homosexuality as both a disorder and a public health problem. With this in mind, Pence called for the government to fund programs that would assist “those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” Overwhelming evidence indicated that at best these programs failed and at worst they traumatized participants. The only foreign policy point Pence stressed was support for Israel, and here he went to great lengths to explain his commitment, which included expanding aid to Israel even if it required cuts in aid to others.
Pence rarely explained his agenda, or any item in it, in detail. At larger events, including rallies and debates, he stressed instead the feel-good message of TV ads, which announced, “He believes that America is one nation, under God, rich with a purpose yet to be fulfilled. Renewing the American dream.” When needed, this big-picture inspiration was supplemented with carefully targeted messages meant to excite small groups of special-interest voters. One mailer, sent to just ten thousand gun enthusiasts, featured an image of the Bill of Rights with several bullet holes. “Some politicians in Washington, D.C. would like to choose what liberties we have,” noted the text in the mailer. “Mike Pence believes they are all worth protecting.”7
Voters who combined religion and politics once again became key to Pence’s campaign, as he stressed his opposition to abortion rights. At many churches and church-affiliated colleges, Pence stirred excitement among those who shared his fears about the country’s moral direction, especially in the areas of sex and reproduction. At Indiana Wesleyan University, students eagerly volunteered for the campaign and followed Pence closely. Then a junior preparing to be a youth minister, Chris Warren, noted that “the idea was that we were going to get ‘one of ours’ into Congress and he would advocate for what we believed.” Warren would become an enthusiastic Pence supporter and volunteer. Upon graduation in 2001, he would become a youth minister for a Church of the Brethren congregation in Madison County, Indiana. Related to the Mennonites and Amish, the Brethren were similarly devoted to plain living, which they expressed in the way they dressed and their focus on their spiritual lives. Warren grew up in this denomination, and since it stressed an even more constrained way of life than he found at the university, he was not surprised by the way students there were monitored and policed.
At Indiana Wesleyan, students were expected to avoid alcohol, drugs, dancing, and sex of all kinds. The Wesleyan lifestyle was enforced by official university policies and peer pressure that was formalized to include a kind of buddy system that required confession and counseling that reinforced abstinence in times of temptation. Students regularly consulted each other on the power of their urges and shared strategies for dealing with them. The sense of crisis that attended an unmarried student’s pregnancy was heightened by the community’s belief, which Pence voiced in political terms, that except in rare cases, all abortion was murder.
This position, which countenanced a few abortions, actually put Pence at odds with the formal teaching of the Catholic Church, which had joined forces with the right wing to address the abortion issue. Unlike their allies, including Pence, Catholic leaders considered every fertilized egg and developing fetus to be equally divine and thus opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The Catholic hierarchy was logically consistent, but its view was so far out of the American political mainstream that it was untenable for most politicians. So it was that Mike Pence would endorse the idea of certain fetuses being aborted because they were conceived through crime. Would his version of Christ agree? Probably not.
Although Indiana was assumed to lean toward conservative Christianity, public opinion on abortion mirrored the nation with a little more than half favoring a woman’s right to choose freely, at least during the first three months of pregnancy. When surveyed, fewer than half of the state voters said the issue motivated them when they went to the polls; however, the number was greater among GOP primary voters, who were more likely to share Pence’s view. This sentiment also explained why all the other Republicans hoping to win the nomination for the Second District seat held the exact same position. Antiabortion voters were motivated voters, and no one wanted to risk alienating them.
Generally willing to go further than his rivals, Pence told a gathering of teens at a youth center in his hometown of Columbus that he was opposed to laws that would make attacks on gay people hate crimes worthy of extra punishment. (Comparable laws already established extra penalties in crimes motivated by racial or religious animus.) He also said that he would fight efforts to give same-sex couples who sought to marry legal status and access to all the benefits that state and federal laws afforded heterosexual married couples. Heterosexual marriage “should be elevated, held higher than, esteemed more under the law than any other relationship,” he explained.
In standing against both marriage equality and hate crime protections for gay Americans, Pence flashed signals to voters who cared most about social changes that offended their sense of order, especially when it came to issues around sex and gender. Sexual morality and the roles of men and women have long been motivating concerns for religious conservatives who saw an unfolding disaster in feminism, birth control, abortion, widespread divorce, single-parent households, and sexual equality. As preaching crusades gave way to televangelism, the alarm about social change grew louder, and believers’ political engagement grew more intense. For some, a so-called biblical worldview justified rejecting science, history, and democratic norms in the pursuit of a Christian America that reflected God’s rule. Others thought they were preparing for an actual conflict with an Antichrist who might already be walking the earth. They considered the Muslim world to be aligned with this evil force and considered modern Israel’s creation, with Jerusalem as its capital, as a precondition for the battle of Armageddon, the return of Jesus, and the conversion of Jews.
Whether they were hoping to make America a Christian nation or preparing for the so-called end of days, politically inspired Christian Right activists felt God’s call to action. This feeling made them willing to make common cause—even with those who seemed to worship money rather than the deity—if such alliances brought them closer to fulfilling God’s plan. Few politicians voiced the belief that the apocalypse of prophecy was imminent. Instead, they indicated their Christian Right bona fides by expressing affection for an American past favored by the Christian Right, including children standing at their desks and reciting the Lord’s Prayer as they did in most places prior to a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that determined the practice violated the separation of church and state. Decades later, Pence used a pair of creative arguments to breathe life into this issue.
At the Columbus youth center, Pence first talked about the state religions that existed in the colonies before the United States came into being. (Pence didn’
t mention the fact that the founders explicitly opposed state religions in their new nation.) Then he added some blood-and-guts patriotism to the argument, saying, “The idea that the blood spilled on the battlefields from Gettysburg to Iwo Jima was spilled to prevent [school prayer] from happening is ridiculous.” Since these battles were fought before the Supreme Court determined that school prayer was unconstitutional, they weren’t connected in any way. But Pence’s point pleased seventeen-year-old Tim Hollowell, who told the local paper he too was a “real strong Christian.” He considered Pence’s views “cool,” adding, “I could tell he was very firm on his values and wasn’t going to compromise them.”8
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Religious compromise was anathema for conservative Christians who were certain they had the one true faith. In Republican congressional circles as well, compromise was becoming a dirty word. This generation of Republicans had followed Newt Gingrich of Georgia to a new level of partisanship and a controlling majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. They did so not through compromise but by lockstep opposition to all of Democratic president Bill Clinton’s initiatives, adherence to a deeply conservative national agenda, and a crescendo of inflammatory language against anyone, including Republicans, who disagreed with them.
Gingrich would flame out after an ethics scandal forced him to abandon his post as Speaker of the House in 1998 and leave Congress in 1999. Nevertheless, the direction he established for the GOP was set, and it became ever more conservative and ever less willing to reach bipartisan consensus with the Democrats. Within the party, moderates would be replaced by conservatives, and conservatives would be usurped by archconservatives who reveled in shocking opponents with claims flirting with flat-earth-style extremism. This rhetoric included strained efforts to deny the vast and persuasive evidence that human activity caused dangerous changes in the earth’s climate. In a convenient marriage of religion and libertarian business interests, Christian conservatives argued that God had given humanity dominion over the earth and predetermined its destiny. This meant that efforts to combat climate change were not just foolish but unchristian. Of course, antipollution rules could also be costly to industrialists who owned oil and chemical refineries. Little wonder that funds from these firms and their owners, including the famous billionaire Koch brothers, supported right-wing organizations and candidates who denied the reality of a warming planet and all the havoc this phenomenon would wreak on the lives of its inhabitants.
The Shadow President Page 11