For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
—Luke 14:11
One day, Mike Pence would be considered the most famous person ever to have visited Fountain City, Indiana. On a cloudless one hundred–degree day in July 1988, he was just an apparition in the shimmering heat on two-lane Route 27. Ahead waited a tiny community—shops on the main highway, neat side streets—of roughly seven hundred.
A little too old for his short-shorts and a little too big for his fat-tire mountain bike, Pence struggled against the drafts created by passing 18-wheelers. When he reached a slight incline, which passed for a hill in the flat terrain, he stood to use the weight of his body against the pedals. A sticker pasted onto the front of his plaid short-sleeve shirt read, “Mike Pence Congress.”
An attorney who hated the law and a native son with the grandest political ambition, it had been inevitable that Pence would run for office. He started by visiting Republican grandees to seek their blessings. One, an irascible former Nixon man named Keith Bulen, received him in a basement office Pence described as a “bat cave” illuminated only by a single desk lamp. With a gift for drama that hid his own insecurities, Bulen liked to test others. He asked why Pence thought he could succeed at politics. Pence replied, “Well, I’ve won several awards for public speaking.”
“What the hell does public speaking have to do with winning an election?” shot back Bulen.1
Although Bulen was on to something, Pence didn’t hesitate to bypass the training grounds of city and state politics, where men and women traditionally paid their dues, made connections, established reputations, and honed their craft. Just as Bulen had once been an upstart challenging the party elders, Pence presumed he was ready to shoot for the top. At age twenty-nine, Pence showed he had the stamina to conduct an aggressive campaign, including the bike tour, which brought him face-to-face with voters across the Second Congressional District. He was often accompanied by Karen, who rode a matching bike and wore a white PENCE FOR CONGRESS T-shirt. Every bit as bright and assertive as her husband, Karen was a political advisor as well as a spouse. Together they looked like a nice young couple sweatily committed to a dream, which is exactly what they were.
In politics, as in showbiz, backstage planning makes a performance seem spontaneous. So it was with the Mike-on-a-bike show. An advance man or woman drove ahead of the bikers to arrange meetings and press interviews at photo-friendly sites—a grain silo, a general store, a diner. Behind them, a staffer followed in a van emblazoned with the campaign sign: PENCE FOR CONGRESS. Trouper that he was, Pence stayed in character. Why spoil it for the audience and voters? “I think people responded well to someone who comes riding along down the street straddling a bicycle,” he told a reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Republic. “It’s nothing more than one person relating to another and I don’t think you can get any more effective in campaigning than that.”2
The tour did offer unplanned encounters. On open stretches of road, the campaigning couple would pause to chat with a man mowing his lawn or a woman collecting letters from her mailbox. Here, Mike could blend Midwest charm with the poise of a skillful public speaker, creating just the right impression. Even die-hard Democrats liked him. “He stopped at the house and asked for a glass of water,” recalled Tracy Souza, whose father, then-congressman Lee Hamilton, was a giant in the state’s Democratic Party. “He came across as a really nice guy.” Pence came across well with donors too. Individual contributions poured in from wealthy Indiana supporters along with other well-heeled midwesterners, such as Mary Kohler of the Kohler plumbing fortune. She and her husband were deeply engaged in politics and giving money to candidates and causes, though Mary Kohler had her own distinct brand of private funding. She used her private jet, for example, to transport rare bird eggs around the country to help restore species that had been wiped out in regions where development and industries destroyed their habitat.3
Mike’s father, Ed, had been a tough sell when Mike sought his support. Mike and his family told the story that Ed Pence had been against his son’s decision to run. Mike held his ground when his father peppered him with questions. Finally satisfied, Ed was all in. By the spring of 1988, with the primary approaching, Ed was touring the district with a trunkful of campaign yard signs as he introduced his son to everyone he knew.
On April 12, Ed decided to take a break and play golf at Harrison Lakes Country Club. Somewhere out on the course, he suffered a heart attack. The fire department ambulance brought him to the emergency room at Bartholomew County Hospital, which was less than ten miles away. Although he got immediate attention, the damage to Pence’s heart muscle was too great. He was pronounced dead soon after arriving. He was fifty-eight years old. Mike suspended his campaign for a few days so that he could be with his family and Karen. Her own father, a former United Airlines executive who had moved to Las Vegas, had died only a month earlier.
Coming weeks before primary voting, the break didn’t affect Pence’s momentum. Thanks in part to his father’s enthusiastic support, Pence enjoyed a five-to-one funding advantage over his primary election rival, an accountant named Raymond Schwab. Executives at Cummins and other corporations rallied donations for Pence. In political campaigning, money attracts money, and Republican Party bosses recognized Mike’s ability to make the system work. Ten of the eleven county chairmen in the district announced their support. Pence defeated Schwab by more than two to one. Flush with victory, Pence declared himself a natural-born winner. “What you are seeing is the genesis of a consensus candidacy, a candidacy that the vast majority of Republicans can say, ‘This is the guy who can beat Phil Sharp and we’re going to get behind him.’”4
A Democrat who kept getting reelected, Philip Sharp, a professor at Ball State University, first went to Congress in 1974 as part of the huge post-Watergate class. (Voters punished President Nixon’s GOP by electing dozens of new Democrats to Congress.) Sharp’s party affiliation and his doctorate in foreign policy made him a bit of an anomaly in a state where Republicans dominated. But with impeccable manners and a long fuse, Sharp had the neighborly demeanor Indiana voters seemed to favor. He counted farmers in his immediate family and understood the concerns of his constituents and the way they looked at the world.5
Sensitive to Tip O’Neill’s old saw, “All politics is local,” Sharp hired more aides to work in Indiana than in Washington and assigned some of them to travel the district in a van offering on-the-spot constituent services. People got so accustomed to turning to him for help that all sorts of strange requests came in. (In one instance when a worker fell into a big water tank, Sharp’s office got the first emergency call.) Constituent services helped the Democrat win over just enough Republicans and independents to come out on top in seven straight elections.
In addition to his modest style, Sharp cultivated a middle-of-the-road voting record that gave opponents little to attack. During his time in Congress, both parties counted substantial numbers of moderates who frequently crossed party lines to support legislation. Northern Republicans voted for social programs. Southern Democrats eagerly funded the military and cut taxes. In this environment, Sharp was remarkably successful at devising proposals that would be adopted by Congress. After analyzing the records of the state’s House members, The Indianapolis News judged him the most effective of them all, noting that ten of the thirteen bills he proposed passed. The runner-up had managed only five legislative successes. At the bottom of the rankings, Representative Andy Jacobs went three for sixty-four.
Sharp’s total package—personality, performance, perspective—made him such a formidable incumbent that established politicians feared running against him. In seven elections, he had squared off against a farmer, a shoe salesman turned state bureaucrat, and a Ball State University public affairs officer. Conservative third-party candidates such as Libertarian Cecil Bohannon sometimes complicated things for the GOP and split the vote, making victory even more difficult. The net result was that in a district where 56 percent of the voters were registered Republicans, Sharp had achieved victory every time, with margins that ranged from seven to twenty-five percentage points.
The GOP’s advantage in registration meant that national party leaders generally considered Sharp one of the more vulnerable Democrats in the House, and he was always among the thirty or forty members targeted for special attention. However, none of the candidates put forward against him since 1974 had proved to have much charisma or skill. Young, handsome, and gifted on the stump, Pence had more promise, but anyone willing to take the chance knew that, in all likelihood, the result would be a losing campaign that would only yield valuable experience and, perhaps, some useful contacts.6
In 1988, a young Republican couldn’t hope for a better point of contact than President Reagan, and thus many made their way to the Capitol seeking a handshake and photo opportunity. All presidents do this kind of duty, giving candidates both a reward and a trophy in the form of a story to tell about how “I was just with the president.” During a lifetime of celebrity, Reagan had so perfected his meet-and-greet technique that he seemed to enjoy every encounter; perhaps he did, or perhaps it was his Hollywood training. The party’s slate of congressional contenders was invited to attend a reception in the Blue Room. With its French Empire furnishings, acquired in the refurbishing done after the mansion was burned by the British in the War of 1812, the room overlooks the South Lawn and is often used for receiving lines.
As he waited in his dark suit and red tie, Pence prepared, as he would recall, “to say something of meaning to the great man.” For a president who no doubt heard thousands of attempts at meaning in reception lines, the brief exchanges that occurred as hand met hand and cameras clicked were not memorable. Pence, however, recounted the moment for the Congressional Record, upon Reagan’s death, in 2004:
I had the privilege in 1988 as a candidate for Congress to sit with the president in the Blue Room of the White House and speak to him personally, and on that occasion, that great privilege of my life, I was able to look the president in the eye as he asked me how my campaign was going. I said, “Mr. President, it is going fine, but I just want to thank you for everything you have done for our country and to encourage my generation of Americans to believe in this country again.”
In other tellings, Pence would add that Reagan demonstrated “real humility,” which he admired. “He seemed surprised,” Pence said of Reagan. “His cheeks appeared to redden with embarrassment, and he said, “‘Well, Mike, that’s a very nice thing for you to say.’”
In the Blue Room, Reagan and Pence sat side by side in matching gilded chairs, which had been placed in front of a fireplace. A French bronze doré clock, acquired by James Madison, kept time on the carved white mantel behind them. When the White House photographer moved in to capture the moment, neither Reagan and Pence struck very different poses. The smiling Reagan set himself in perfect profile with his chin slightly raised and his eyes focused over Pence’s shoulder. He looked like he had his face toward the sun and it had lit him up. Pence, his curly, dark hair cut short, grasped one arm of his chair and looked down at the hands of the seventy-seven-year-old president. In this image, they could have been grandfather and grandson.
After all the photos were taken, Reagan spoke to the assembly of young Republicans, saying, “Many of you have thanked me for what I did for America, but I want you to know I don’t think I did anything. The American people decided it was time to right the ship, and I was just the captain they put on the bridge when they did it.”
* * *
Back home in Indiana, candidate Pence resumed his bike tour, though as the novelty faded, it gained him less and less attention. With no record of his own to defend, Pence played offense on the campaign. He criticized Sharp for taking money from political action committees (PACs), which presumably gave donations in hopes of advancing their interests. Pence vowed not to take any money from PACs, but his wealthy supporters gave him more than $425,000, a sizeable sum at the time and about the same amount that Sharp took in. In a sign of his rookie status, Pence provoked his own campaign finance snafu by repeatedly missing the filing deadline to report on his fund-raising. When he finally did submit his papers to state and federal officials, they were riddled with errors. His campaign aides blamed Pence’s mother and a friend, who had handled these responsibilities. They said the problems were not a matter of intent but rather the result of inexperience and poor arithmetic skills.
Pence and Sharp differed on basic issues. Pence opposed abortion and wanted it outlawed. Sharp was pro-choice. The voters were so closely divided that neither candidate got much advantage out of any issue, even such a contentious one. For every fervent antiabortion voter who might choose Pence solely on this issue, a comparable number could have voted for Phil Sharp because he was among the first to talk about defending the earth from pollution-caused climate change. In this era, when people were more likely to identify themselves as political moderates than in later years, elections were not likely to be determined by any single issue. Voters tended to pick among individual candidates rather than mark straight party tickets. Pence understood this, saying, “I never had a whole lot of faith in people who said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a Republican or Democrat.’ I think it’s a lot more important to tell who you are and what you stand for. The reason I became a Republican is because it was their ideas I agreed with.”
Besides his opposition to abortion, Pence advanced a standard Republican platform, which called for increased defense spending, tax cuts, and curbs on federal regulations. Faced with an incumbent who was a whiz at bringing projects home to Indiana, he pledged that getting funds to widen a local highway—he called it “four-laning” the road—would be his number one priority. Of course, there was no reason why Sharp couldn’t deliver the same highway funds, and given his seniority in the party that controlled the Congress, he might have been expected to have an easier time of it.
As the election drew closer, Pence could not find traction against Sharp. Few voters seemed moved by road projects or his stance on campaign finance. At the same time, his pleasant personality was so similar to Sharp’s that they could have been brothers. When newspaper articles began to note that many voters didn’t seem to know much at all about him, Pence tried to win over Republicans by appealing to party identity. That didn’t work well either. When he complained that Sharp’s votes in Congress too often aligned with his Democratic colleagues, he was met with the fact that Sharp actually voted with House Republicans almost 30 percent of the time. On the opposite side of the ledger, Pence had to admit that he had admired certain Democrats, especially President Kennedy, who “meant something to me because he was a leader and not simply a politician. He stood for a lot of things I believe in. If you look at the record, you’ll see he cut taxes, was strong in defense, and stood up to the Russians.”
Pence also used the Republican argument that he was more likely than a Democrat to hold strong against America’s adversaries, and he suggested that some of his resolve in life developed in response to hard times in childhood. “I had a lot of experiences in life that were very difficult,” he said. “I was very chubby and unpopular when I was a kid. And I had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the guys my age.” Although he overcame his difficulties, Pence said, “I’ve never forgot what it’s like to be in that position, to be looked down upon because I was fat, or a fourth-string center, or in shop class.” In a state where factory work remained an essential part of the economy, the shop class note probably sounded sour to some voters, but Pence’s intention—to claim that despite all appearances he had experienced some suffering in life—was clear. “Having gone through that,” he continued, “has taught me that every person in this world has value, no matter what their position or status. I’ll never forget that.”
Pence’s life story, as he recalled it, would have sounded odd to anyone who knew him well. This was the same person who modeled spring clothes as a child, won debates, led the CYO, was elected president of his high school class, and became president of his fraternity at an expensive private college. His family had been sufficiently well off to live in ever-larger homes and to belong to the private country club in Columbus.
The challenge Pence faced—to connect with voters personally and politically—would have been daunting in a race for city council. In a sprawling rural congressional district with small cities like Muncie and rural expanses of rolling farmland, he could, at best, present a series of clichés about himself. “Conservative, energetic, and earnest young man” was what he chose to offer. Sometimes he tried to mix in a bit of humor, but the tactic came with its own risks. After answering questions at Franklin College, a small liberal arts school, he spotted a student wearing an armband bearing Sharp’s name. “Ah, Hitler Youth, I see,” said the candidate.7
Pence wasn’t alone in the struggle to make a good impression. Sharp was the incumbent but could not let his guard down. As a former college professor, his biographical sketch suggested the image of “experience, intelligence, and open-mindedness.” Of course, a sizeable number of voters would consider these to be negative traits indicating he was a wishy-washy, out-of-touch political insider. No one who hoped to be known would be satisfied with a chalk-outline identity, but as expediency forced them to choose these traits, the process revealed something meaningful. Their selected traits reflected an idealized self—the one they strived to achieve—and also brought attention to what they left out. Politics is a game of ego and ambition, but both men avoided being identified by either of those. Error and incompetence are also normal in politics, but admitting them is anathema.
All the posturing made Sharp and Pence easy targets for the jibes delivered at a traditional election year roast sponsored by local journalists. The event was held at a convention center in downtown Muncie, where about 175 people sat at big round tables dining on banquet food and ready to laugh. Sharp and Pence were required to sit there facing the audience, smiling and chuckling as roasters stood and mocked them from a lectern.
Sharp is “so broad-minded he can’t even take his own side in an argument.”
Pence is so conservative “he doesn’t try anything first.”
Sharp’s first election victory came against an opponent who campaigned like a “dead squirrel.”
Pence “rides through this district on a tricycle. Sharp walks because he can’t ride” a bike.
“Phil reminds me of a cat watching a canary fall into a goldfish bowl. He knows if he waits long enough, he can have two meals at once.”8
Pence and Sharp also faced off in two televised debates. A panel of journalists went through the issues. Sharp responded testily to a question about campaign contributions, saying the suggestion that he was somehow bought by special interests was “sleazy.” Pence, true to his nice-guy image, wouldn’t go so far as to contradict Sharp’s claim that he was his own person, but he did say that “special interest groups exist to influence Congress.” The two debates found the men often meeting in the political middle. Noting that two-worker families struggled to arrange childcare, Pence wanted the government to help. This was hardly a Republican position. Sharp was critical of labor unions even though they were a central Democratic constituency. Pence tied himself to the most popular politicians in the state, Senators Richard Lugar and Dan Quayle, and to President Reagan. The message was that these were all splendid leaders and Republicans. Since he was a Republican too, he deserved to be elected.
Perhaps it was the vague quality of his argument, or maybe it was his youthful demeanor, but Pence did nothing in his campaign to score points in a way that would help him actually defeat Sharp. Then, with time running out, he began an advertising blitz that delivered two negative messages about Sharp. In one TV ad, a hand filled out a $1 million check on an account held by “Influence Peddlers” and signed with the words D. C. LOBBYISTS. The ad closed with the message, “Mike Pence—nobody’s congressman but yours.”
The second spot was Pence’s own version of the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, which then-Republican candidate for president Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush was using to suggest that his Democratic opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, was soft on crime. William Horton, who never went by Willie, was a black man who committed murder while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The advertisement, which featured an image of a scowling, disheveled Horton, was widely deemed to be racist. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, was proud of the spot and bragged about its effect. The ad’s creator, Larry McCarthy, would say, “The guy looked like an animal” and was “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
Mike Pence’s Horton-style ad was shot in a schoolyard. The video focused on a scary version of a still life: a razor blade, a rolled-up dollar bill, lines of white powder. Red letters bled over the picture, declaring, “There’s something Phil Sharp isn’t telling you about his record on drugs.” The spot ended with the words “It’s weak” written in white powder. The print version of the ad featured a lovely photo of Mike Pence in a jacket and tie, arms folded across his chest, a determined and confident look on his face opposite images of the same props—razor, powder, rolled-up bill. The piece claimed that Sharp was responsible for “1,200 convicted drug pushers … being set free.” Instead of protecting “our children, Phil Sharp has supported the rights of drug pushers.”
Pence’s ad presented no explanation for Phil Sharp’s alleged disregard for children in the war on drugs. Maybe Sharp was well intentioned but wrong on policy. Maybe he was just evil. The reason didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Sharp was trying to hide a weak record. Who had a strong record? Well, Pence couldn’t claim any record at all, because he had never served in any office. However, he had called for the execution of convicted drug “kingpins,” whomever they were, and this proposal was something he repeated often. (Decades later, President Donald Trump would advocate the same policy—execution—for dealers.)
As with all art forms, campaign ads communicate as much with what’s left out as with what’s included. In these two instances, Pence left out the fact that Sharp had received $1 million in PAC money over fourteen years and that his vote on violent offenders had not been against the idea of treating them firmly but in favor of having a committee work on a tough-minded proposal. Sharp was irritated by the blizzard of negative TV spots, which Pence bought at a cost of about $100,000, but they were not enough to tilt the election.
On Election Night, Pence was tantalized by early returns from the most heavily Republican corners of the district, which showed him with a lead of more than thirteen thousand votes. However, as larger cities such as Muncie began to complete their tallies, the balance shifted. At 10:30 P.M., Sharp was so far ahead that Pence called his opponent’s campaign headquarters to congratulate him. Sharp, who had been home playing Monopoly with his wife and two children, wasn’t there. When they finally spoke, both were gracious, but Sharp remained annoyed, telling reporters that many voters he had spoken to had “expressed disgust at all the negativism” coming from his challenger. Pence had a different take. “We didn’t run a negative campaign,” he said. “We’ve run one that was bluntly honest.”
The result, a six-point win for Sharp, came even as the top of the GOP ticket—George Bush and Indiana’s native son Dan Quayle—won the state by twenty points. While Pence was surely frustrated, he resisted those who expressed “condolences” on Election Night. “Nobody’s dead,” he said, a reminder that he had endured his father’s death earlier in the year. Compared with that experience, an election loss was easy. Besides, Pence could take comfort in the fact that he had come closer to beating Sharp than any previous challenger. He also established himself as an attractive candidate who could manage a campaign and stand up to the rigors of the contest. He understood the political capital he had amassed, and so, even on a night when he lost, he declared a victory of sorts. “Nine months ago, I was an unknown lawyer, and nine months later, we were able to convince 100,000 people. I think we just ran out of time.”
* * *
Mike Pence’s 1988 Election Night “ran out of time” line echoed the words of countless coaches and athletes who respond to defeat by saying they were beaten by the timer on the scoreboard. This perspective helps competitors sustain the confidence they need to play the next game. In this instance, Pence immediately began talking about his next run. In the summer of 1989, he went to Washington and met with Lee Atwater himself, who had become chairman of the Republican National Committee on the strength of his success as the architect of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. A notoriously ruthless operative, Atwater was the type of swaggering political hit man who said of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis that he would “strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate.” Atwater also understood that the success of the GOP’s so-called Southern Strategy depended on the party’s ability to appeal to the racist underpinnings of white voters.9
Still riding high from the 1988 campaign and eighteen months away from his death from brain cancer at the age of forty, Atwater advised Pence to prepare for a 1990 rematch with Sharp. (In the final months of his life, Atwater began a rapid journey toward repentance, which would culminate in an apology to Michael Dukakis and a public confession that “while I didn’t invent negative politics, I am one of its most ardent practitioners.”) By the fall of 1989, Pence was organizing fund-raisers and acknowledging that he was likely to declare his candidacy. This time around, Pence’s donor list showed that he appealed to the two main factions in conservative politics: right-wing Christians and pro-business activists. Corporate executives, especially those in the government-regulated health care and oil industries, gave generously. Among the religiously motivated were billionaire Richard DeVos, Christian Right campaigner Richard Viguerie, and evangelist Jacqueline Yockey, whose radio station beamed Christian messages to listeners in Israel and neighboring states. Far more strident than the moderates they hoped to supplant, at every level of the GOP, activists in these two camps were becoming more intently engaged in campaigns.
On a national level, major Republican donors, including the DeVos, Koch, and Scaife families, backed Christian Right organizations such as the Family Research Council (FRC) and the Council for National Policy (CNP), which, despite their bland names, advocated radical religiously inspired policies. The CNP, to take just one, was created in 1981 to support “a united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.” Its founder, Rev. Tim LaHaye, accepted that Bible prophecy of the apocalypse was at hand and that a conspiracy of a mythical group called the Illuminati controlled much of world affairs. (His famous “Left Behind” series of books imagined a future when evangelical Christians have been brought to heaven and the people left behind suffer and battle with the Antichrist.) Though it kept its membership private, documents leaked to the press showed the CNF was supported by a who’s who of conservative America.10
The national elements of the religious Right were matched on the state level across the country. In Indiana, the Pence campaign received financial and moral backing from leaders such as Rev. Gene Hood of Independent Nazarene Church, who was part of a growing movement of wealthy, politically conservative Christians. The energy for these activists was different from the traditional evangelizing, gospel-preaching devotion to saving as many souls as possible. Hood, like national leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was an alarmist who used fear to mobilize. This was accomplished by dividing the world into Us and Them and then interpreting changes that brought rights to others, especially gay Americans, as losses for their side. Thus, laws barring discrimination became attacks on conservative Christians’ rights to discrimination on religious grounds. Hood benefited from the privileges of a pastor, living in a church-owned home and enjoying special tax breaks afforded to clergy. He was also a wealthy businessman who owned companies involved in insurance, real estate, radio, and electronics. The insurance company alone took in $25 million in revenue annually.11
In 1986, an assistant pastor at Hood’s church, Rev. Donald Lynch, became one of the first hard-Right neophytes to use provocative social issues to storm the GOP and win an important primary. (He had run against Sharp one cycle before Pence in the general election.) Lynch’s main campaign issue was HIV/AIDS, and he advocated “isolation and quarantine” of people who contracted the virus. He also proposed that cities that failed to forcibly close “bathhouses and pleasure dens” be denied all federal funds. In the May 1986 primary, he knocked off a conventional Republican named Jay Wickliff. Facing Sharp in the general elections, Lynch’s campaign tried to present a more mainstream image, even demanding he not be referred to as “Pastor” or “Reverend.” It didn’t work. Sharp swamped Lynch 62 to 38.12
Lynch’s defeat, combined with losses by others who ran as part of the Indiana religious Right, signaled the limited political appeal of an overtly conservative Christian message. Preaching and protest—rather than running for office—became the focus for activists. No one in Indiana was better known for this kind of action than Lynch’s boss at Independent Nazarene. Rev. Hood was arrested at a clinic where abortions were performed and led a crowd of two hundred that stormed the famous Indiana Roof Ballroom to disrupt the 1988 Miss Gay America pageant. Some demonstrators with him wore surgical masks to signal their fear of HIV/AIDS. Others held Bibles aloft. But the flamboyant Hood issued an extremist warning of violence on behalf of those who could not abide the thought of a national drag queen pageant occurring in their community. He said, “If they try this another time, I’m telling you, there’s going to be bloodshed. We mean business. There are some red-blooded men in Indianapolis, and we won’t stand for this.”13
The pageant protest reflected the local conservative Christian community’s response to changing social mores and a belief that the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was first noted in the gay community, indicated God’s punishment for liberal views on sex in general and homosexuality in particular. Indiana became a focal point for public conflict on HIV/AIDS when Ryan White, a hemophiliac infected via transfusion, was barred from school in Kokomo, Indiana, by officials who didn’t accept the science that showed his presence did not present a health risk to others. The boy’s parents successfully sued the school system, and Ryan White’s condition changed the perspective on HIV/AIDS, no longer a “gay disease.” Though White’s case gained international attention, it did not settle the culture war waged by activists like Hood who, besides speaking out on social issues, gave contributions to Pence and other like-minded politicians.14
Mike Pence began to develop ties with admired national figures on the hard-core libertarian Right, including the billionaire DeVos and Koch families. In addition to unfettered free enterprise, the DeVoses promoted right-wing Christianity. The Kochs were not much interested in religion but pushed libertarian tax and regulation slashing with the zeal of crusaders. As they turned Koch Industries, their father’s oil refining business, into one of the largest privately held companies in the world, they used their billions to build political organizations and support candidates that would shrink government and promote capitalism in its place. Ironically, Fred Koch built his business by making deals in the 1920s and 1930s in the competition-free Soviet Union. His sons David and Charles Koch opposed all regulation, especially all laws that aimed to protect the environment. Not coincidentally, Koch Industries was one of the most prolific polluters in the country and did business so ruthlessly—even cheating sellers in the way crude oil was weighed—that they proved the need for government oversight and regulation.15
In the 1980s, the Kochs’ national political focus extended to state-level organizations, promoting the same doctrine and seeking out candidates who performed according to their agenda. The network they created would eventually function like a shadow political party, nurturing and promoting candidates who challenged regular Republicans and pushed the GOP ever rightward. In Indiana, Mike Pence was an obvious choice.
Pence also attracted the financial and political aid of Charles S. Quilhot, who had cofounded a new organization, the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. The IPR, as it was known, was part of a new wave of state-level political organizations created to promote policies such as the privatization of schools and other government activities, rolling back environmental and business regulation, and lowering taxes. The IPR also provided jobs for people who moved in and out of political campaigns and government. They replicated, on the state level, older national organizations like the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, which, for example, welcomed Indiana businessman/politician Mark Lubbers as he moved between the public and private sectors. Lubbers, in turn, donated campaign money to Mike Pence, among others.
IPR’s origin story, told to The Indianapolis Star, described a dozen conservative businessmen gathered like the apostles at a Mexican restaurant in Indianapolis, Acapulco Joe’s, to conceive of a way to get more out of a state political system that was already friendly to their interests. Soon, they had engaged one of the nation’s most prominent young conservative agitators, Dinesh D’Souza, as their chief consultant. Not yet thirty years old, D’Souza had gained notoriety as a student at Dartmouth, where he edited a newspaper that outed gay students, mocked African Americans, and parodied mainstream politics. (Unaffiliated with Dartmouth, the paper was supported financially by conservative alumni.) After college, D’Souza had embarked on a high-flying career that had already included a stint at the Heritage Foundation. In 2014, his reputation would be tarnished by a plea of guilty in a case involving violation of campaign laws, even though four years later, in May 2018, Trump singled him out and issued a pardon. But at the time when D’Souza advised the founders of IPR, he was among the most admired conservative activists of his generation. He steered the Acapulco Joe schemers to a conference in California, where the Heritage Foundation taught attendees from around the country how to plant and nourish state-level organizations so a right-wing agenda could be pushed at every level of society. Major foundations in Indiana shied away from IPR, but smaller ones did support the group. One such foundation was a trust organized by an Indiana-based manufacturing firm called Dekko. A Dekko official, Linda Speakman, described IPR’s mission as aligned with its own. “One of our beliefs,” she said, “is that we feel, in a sense, government is our enemy.”16
As with many state think tanks around the country that emerged in the late 1980s, IPR was affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), which was backed with donations from a variety of right-wing foundations, including groups created by Charles and David Koch. Ironically, U.S. law considered such “educational” or “public welfare” nonprofits as tax-exempt. Such free-market, anti-government funders would say they were merely playing by the established rules and would be foolish to do otherwise. At this time, the Kochs and like-minded people with huge sums to invest in politics were creating new initiatives to deliver change that the Republican Party had failed to provide. In general, they wanted to shrink government at all levels, while encouraging profit-driven entities to dominate every other sector of society. A key figure in the SPN was the same Fort Wayne businessman, Byron S. Lamm, who helped create IPR.
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 decision 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.”