* * *
Many in the Indiana press corps found Pence to be pleasant but standoffish, except for a strange habit: he was into shoulder rubs. John Krull, who had been with The Indianapolis News and later with the ACLU, had his run-ins with Pence, yet they got along well enough. “Why are you so tough on me?” Krull said Pence asked once in a while. Krull used the complaint as fodder for a column. Then one day, he stood chatting with a colleague when, “all of a sudden, somebody was grabbing my shoulders from behind and almost massaging them. I turned around and I was surprised—it was the governor, Mike Pence.” Pence did this a number of times with Krull. “Grabbing,” he said, “a real quick grasping thing.” It made him uncomfortable. “I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy,” added Krull. “That’s not something I would do with someone else without an engraved invitation.”13
In the locker room subculture of political men, Pence’s extra-warm physical greetings communicated volumes. On one level, it was a bonding move. On another, it indicated aggression. Watch older politicians when they are together and you will see that they shake hands, touch shoulders, and lean into each other in ways rarely seen in other settings. This is great ape dominance behavior indulged by men in suits and ties. For some, the move is a bicep grab. For others, it’s invading a colleague’s personal space. Pence had a thing about shoulders. Later, he would remark that “to be around Donald Trump is to be around a man with broad shoulders,” or that “he’s a man with broad shoulders, he’s got a clear vision, he’s strong.”14
Friendly though he might be with reporters, Pence was resistant when it came to the public’s right to know what was happening inside the government. Bureaucratic stalling is a time-honored tradition for politicians hoping to muffle bad news. However, as a veteran of the mass media, Pence wanted to take the game a bit further. He ordered his office to create a state-run news agency that would be called “JustIN” and was designed to provide state news to Indiana newspapers and broadcasters without the middleman—that is, without reporters gathering the information. The idea of a government news agency competing directly with the press while providing an official propagandistic slant was met with outrage and derision by publishers and reporters in Indiana and beyond. The Atlantic dubbed the project “Pravda on the Plains” and mocked Pence for the idea.
“Can you imagine, for example, that a Republican governor with a reputation as a small-government conservative would try to launch a government-run news service to disseminate information under the guise of journalism?” wrote David A. Graham. “What JustIN most resembles is a push by successive presidential administrations of both parties to marginalize the political press corps.”15
Pravda on the Plains stuck. Even state Republicans mocked him. The speaker of Indiana’s House of Representatives, Brian Bosma, said the idea was “horrible,” then joked that he had ordered Russian translation software to deal with Pence’s news service. The Democratic minority leader, Scott Pelath, said Pence’s news service initiative provided “several days’ worth of ridicule for our state from all sectors.” Pence and his staff abandoned the news service idea within a week and tried to argue it had never been a serious notion. However, they already had hired a managing editor for the news service, who was discreetly sent packing.
Although he was mocked for his failed news service idea, Pence was still taken seriously enough to be an appealing potential presidential candidate. Of course, he would have to win Republican Party primaries and caucuses before he could even think about a general election, and that task would require appealing to hard-right conservatives who were more influential and invested in national Republican politics when it came to the candidate selection process than were Republican moderates. These voters expected Pence to talk like someone who was tough on crime, opposed to abortion rights, against unions, and in favor of private education. They also expected him to back his words with action.
On education, though, Pence was often stymied by Glenda Ritz, who was Indiana’s state school superintendent, an elected position. Nationwide, only a few such elected state commission posts existed, and for Pence, this oddity meant that he was more constrained than most governors when it came to influencing public school policy. The challenge was even trickier given the fact that Ritz, a career teacher who had never run for office before, had received more votes than Pence had in the 2012 elections.
With Republicans controlling the legislature and governor’s office, Ritz was the only Democrat who could wield real power in the state government, but her reach was limited to regulating some aspects of education and setting broad policy outlines. (One of her specific proposals involved lowering the age when all children were required to be enrolled in school from seven to five.) The governor did have authority to appoint members to a state education board that could place checks on the superintendent. Pence moved to further impede Ritz by creating a new agency, which he called the Center for Education and Career Innovation. This new bureaucracy was tasked with advancing Pence’s education ideas, most notably an expansion of school vouchers and a new school evaluation system. Pence also wanted schools to focus more on training programs for employment in local industry. These measures echoed the interests of his major campaign supporters—Richard (“Dick”) and Betsy DeVos, who spent millions on promoting school vouchers nationwide.
Publicly, the governor insisted he was only looking out for Indiana’s children. Ritz “misunderstood my sincere desire” to help the state’s students, Pence wrote in an opinion piece published in state newspapers. Ritz saw a power grab, and her view was confirmed when journalists uncovered an internal memo at Pence’s new education center, recommending changes in state law to remove her as head of the state education board. Then came a conflict over staffing for the education board. Members appointed by Pence wanted to bring in aides working for the new education center. Ritz wanted to keep things as they had always been, with her department staff doing this work.16
The conflict between Ritz and the governor was, ultimately, a struggle over the status of traditional public schools, where children received academic training and came into contact with peers from different backgrounds. Ritz generally favored supporting community-based schools. Pence wanted to allow parents to use tax money to pay for private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling. This idea had created a boom in for-profit schools around the country, but the benefit for students was not clear. In fact, a 2016 Brookings Institution analysis of Indiana’s program found that high-achieving students performed well in voucher programs, but lower-ranking students, who supposedly were the main beneficiaries of the policy, did not. “A student who had entered a private school with a math score at the 50th percentile,” noted the Brookings Institution report, “declined to the 44th percentile after one year.” However, the policy was clearly consistent with the governor’s ideology, which followed the playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing national political organization that promoted the privatization of American schools.17
ALEC, as the group was known, was yet another creation of the political activist Paul Weyrich and his usual funders, including the Koch brothers. It produced model proposals that were then introduced in state legislatures and often became law. The bills reliably favored corporations, from gun manufacturers to tobacco companies to for-profit prisons. ALEC opposed environmental regulations, sought to weaken labor unions, and favored privatization of schools. ALEC’s political leanings were evident. In the 1980s, it opposed sanctions intended to end apartheid in South Africa and argued, against all scientific evidence, that pedophilia was “one of the more dominant practices within the homosexual world.”18
ALEC promoted governmental forums and meetings to encourage state officials to adopt its policies. In education, this meant finding ways to take tax money out of public schools and put it into private hands. This happened early on in Wisconsin in 1990, under a program pushed by Republican governor Tommy Thompson. Thompson said he “loved” ALEC ga
therings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”19
Mike Pence was a prominent figure at ALEC, which promoted antigay policies he favored. He spoke at ALEC events and contributed to its publications. During his battle with Glenda Ritz, he wrote the foreword to ALEC’s annual education report and boasted that Indiana had a recent fivefold increase in the use of school vouchers. That statistic translated into just twenty thousand, or less than 2 percent, of the state’s public school students, out of more than one million. Nevertheless, Pence promoted the fact that he was pushing Indiana in ALEC’s direction. He continued to promote the ALEC agenda and to undermine Ritz, eventually persuading the legislature to remove the superintendent as chair of the board of education. The change would be delayed, however, until after the 2016 election. When he won this skirmish, Pence quickly dissolved the Center for Education and Career Innovation.20
Ironically, with the public focused on his political maneuvering, Pence didn’t get all the attention and credit he deserved for his more effective education initiatives. For example, he worked with Ritz to make prekindergarten more widely available and eventually accepted federal funds—an idea he usually abhorred—in order to expand the program. The state’s experience, and long-standing research, had shown the value of prekindergarten for later student development.21
Although Ritz surely annoyed the governor, her presence meant that he was forced to work with someone who was guided by a different philosophy, who possessed the power to oppose him, and who was willing to use that power. In every other area of Indiana governance, Pence could do almost as he pleased, and the legislature, where Republicans had a supermajority in the Senate and the House, was not inclined to get in his way. The result included projects that in the end turned out to be either poorly conceived or badly executed.
* * *
As Indiana approached the bicentennial of its statehood, Pence proposed more than $50 million worth of projects to mark the occasion, including the construction of an archives building and statehouse welcome center. He appointed Karen as the state’s bicentennial ambassador, and she began to travel around the state promoting Indiana history. Since he was a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative, Pence faced a bit of a challenge when it came to paying for the commemoration. His answer involved an unconventional plan: leasing state-owned cell phone towers to an Ohio company—Agile Networks—that would make an up-front payment of $50 million and promise future payments of $260 million.
Experience elsewhere in such ventures, in which public assets were sold or rented to private entities that would turn a profit by charging users, was mixed at best. Politicians valued the idea of partnerships that allowed them to pursue new projects without raising taxes. However, some studies reported that once engaged in a government partnership, private operators used their monopoly positions—drivers usually have no choice about using a bridge to cross a river—to wring high profits from assets the public had created. For example, investors in a highway sold by the state of Indiana expected to recoup all their purchase cost in fifteen years but had a right to collect rising tolls for seventy-five years. In the first two years of the deal, made by Governor Daniels, the benefit reaped by the taxpayers fell $186 million short of expectations.22
Despite the problems with the toll road, Pence pushed his cell phone tower plan with the argument that privatization had worked well for the state. “Indiana is a national leader in partnerships that deliver sound financial returns and long-term benefits to Hoosiers,” he said as he announced the deal. “This agreement, if approved, will put underused assets into full play, enhance Indiana’s communication capabilities throughout the state, and fund the state’s bicentennial projects.”23
The cell phone tower plan met stiff resistance in the state legislature. “Everyone was skeptical that we could lease those cell towers for that amount of money,” said Karen Tallian, the ranking Democrat on the state Senate Appropriations Committee. “Amongst the budget writers at the time was the general consensus, ‘Oh, this is never gonna fly.’” It did not fly. After the Pence administration signed a tentative contract, a closer examination of the arrangement revealed it was not going to deliver what the governor had imagined. The plan was scaled back, and the legislature had to scramble to find revenue to support what was left of the celebration. There would be no new state archive. The construction of a $24 million hotel, imagined for a state park in northern Indiana, was also canceled.24
* * *
A second and more consequential Pence proposal envisioned a twenty-one-mile extension of Interstate 69 from Bloomington to Martinsville, Indiana, in a public-private partnership—an infrastructure plan known in government industry shorthand as “P3.” Pence touted the project as the right way to build infrastructure, a marriage of private entrepreneurship and government. The interstate project was a telling precursor of what Republicans in Washington—including Pence and Trump—foresaw: nationwide, a $1 trillion infrastructure agenda that would blend government and private enterprise.
Originally part of the federal interstate system, I-69 was mapped to cut across the state from its northeast corner to the southwest city of Evansville. The incomplete Martinsville-to-Bloomington stretch slowed travel and isolated part of the state. It was also a more dangerous roadway than the completed part of the interstate. Previous administrations’ efforts to finish I-69 had been blocked by politics and funding problems. A private-public partnership would ease the way on both fronts, as federal law permitted a faster review process and outside investors might help finance the $325 million cost.
When the bids for the private portion were opened, Indiana officials were surprised to find that one, from a firm called Isolux, was a quarter below all the others. A European company with little experience in the United States, Isolux beat three American companies that each estimated the cost at around $400 million. The Isolux plan seemed too good to be true, and it was. Within weeks of winning the contract, top officials of Isolux were arrested in Spain on charges they had embezzled money and issued bribes in connection with construction of a high-speed rail project. An investigation by The Indianapolis Star reported that the European firm had been banished from other projects it had bid on in Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile. “The company is near insolvency,” the newspaper reported. “The bonds it used to finance I-69 construction, to use the industry’s term, are ‘junk.’”
As Isolux commenced work the project was almost immediately mired in cost overruns. Officials reported slowdowns in construction. Commuters between Indianapolis and Bloomington—the Democratic-majority home of Indiana University—encountered constant traffic jams, and the state Department of Transportation reported a significant increase in the number of traffic accidents in the work zone. The mayor of Bloomington, John Hamilton, sought help from Pence to resolve the dangerous problem. “My first job as mayor is public safety,” Hamilton told reporters. “The seemingly ever-delayed nature of this construction and the danger it poses [to] travelers are unacceptable.”
Hamilton, a Democrat and nephew of longtime Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, said he had no philosophical issue with the concept of public-private partnerships. “I am not against experimenting in government and trying new ways to get things done, but this is a debacle,” Hamilton said. “My community and our neighbors are all suffering because state government hasn’t kept up its end of the bargain.”25
The estimated final cost of the twenty-one-mile stretch of road was raised to around $500 million. By 2016, with just 10 percent of the anticipated paving done, the project was in chaos and two years behind schedule. A private-public initiative that was intended to prove the concept was superior to government-built highways was proving the opposite. Even the libertarian Reason Foundation, funded by Pence’s benefactors David and Charles Koch, criticized the project. “This is one of the worst failures that I’ve seen in state-level P3s,” said Robert Poole, direct
or of transportation policy at the foundation, which also publishes the conservative-libertarian magazine Reason.
The I-69 problem was mostly one Pence made for himself, but others, including the Isolux execs, helped to make the mess. In other instances, Pence was the sole cause of his own trouble. A case in point involved a single citizen—Keith Cooper of Elkhart—whose conviction for an armed robbery and a shooting had been overturned by a state appeals court, but only after he had served ten years in prison. Some of the facts of Cooper’s case can best be explained as he related them to the press: “One morning I decided to go to the store. And on my way returning from the store, I got caught by a train. And I was sitting there waiting on the train. And I see all these police cars with their sirens on—they’re just coming from everywhere. And I’m like to myself, these cops gotta be crazy … not knowing they was coming for me.”26
Two witnesses identified Keith Cooper as being the tall black man involved in the robbery and shooting. He was convicted after a brief trial. In prison, he was convicted of assaulting another inmate. He also earned a high school equivalency degree and two junior college degrees, and trained for hospice care. His conviction, which came with a forty-year sentence, was overturned when two witnesses recanted and suppressed DNA evidence, which had not been shared with him at the time of the trial, showed someone else had been at the scene of the crime.
The Indiana Court of Appeals ordered Cooper’s release in 2006, but the felony remained on the books. Because the law allowed for him to be charged and tried again Cooper was out of prison but still not fully free. Also, his prison time counted against him when he applied for jobs. A trucking company finally gave him a job as a forklift operator, but he always felt the weight of his record. Cooper said, “I didn’t commit the crime. I feel as though I have the right to go and apply for a job without them looking at my background and seeing that hideous crime that’s been placed on my record, for which I’m actually innocent.”
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