Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above ourselves.
—Philippians 2:3
Bright eyes sparkling, his unlined face framed by neatly clipped white hair, Mike Pence bubbled over with charm and enthusiasm as he led the summer interns from his office on a tour of the United States Capitol. Although he could be icy when it came to ideology and his moral focus, Pence’s personality set point was toasty warm. Interns, who gave lots of Capitol tours themselves, were expected to be warm and enthusiastic too.
When the tour reached the West Front of the Capitol, where a special pole is used to run American flags up and down so they can be given away as souvenirs, Pence reminded his charges that this was also where presidents and vice presidents took the oath of office. Anyone standing on the white marble expanse of the Capitol, where daylight bounces off the stone and the great expanse of the Mall stretches toward the Washington Monument, would feel the history and majesty.
Although every inauguration in the interns’ memories had occurred at the West Front, it wasn’t always so. Prior to Ronald Reagan, the ceremonies had been held on the east side of the building, which faces the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. It was there, in 1841, that William Henry Harrison gave the longest inaugural address ever and caught the cold that developed into pneumonia, which killed him. Though born in Virginia, Harrison had become famous as commander of a force that defeated Tecumseh in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. His running mate was John Tyler, hence the famous slogan and campaign song “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”
Indiana’s only native-born president, Harrison’s grandson Benjamin also took the oath on the east side of the Capitol, in 1889. Though historians judge him to have been, at best, a middling president, Benjamin Harrison did live to finish his first term and to be defeated when he sought reelection. He is nevertheless beloved in his home state, where his likeness stands near the Indianapolis War Memorial, his home is a national landmark, and a state park bears his name. Indiana’s schoolchildren, including those who became interns at Pence’s office, are taught his biography.
It’s possible that Pence had both Harrisons in mind when he explained to the interns that were he to be elected president, he would prefer to be sworn in at the Capitol’s East Front. One intern would recall that he said it was all about the light. In January, the noontime sunlight on the west-facing side of the building was just too bright, explained Pence. The glare forced presidents to squint and made every line and wrinkle in every face look more pronounced. On the east side, the indirect rays made everyone look better. And no squinting.
In retrospect, the intern would say that Pence might have been attempting some humor. Why else would he risk sounding like a bridesmaid musing about just how her wedding would go? Also, this episode happened in 2010, and at that time, the congressman from Indiana was just one of 435 members of the House of Representatives. Add a hundred United States senators, fifty governors, and countless other famous leaders and debate club champions, and he was just another person who dreamed of becoming president. What reasonable chance did he have of actually seeing his fantasy come true?
Actually, Pence’s chances were better than the casual observer could imagine. Two years before he daydreamed aloud about his future inauguration, Esquire magazine had included him among its “ten best” members of Congress. The generally liberal magazine liked Mike because he was a conservative who didn’t come across as hard-edged and because he was against the practice of “earmarking,” which members of Congress had long used to send federal money home for specific purposes. Before it was canceled, the most infamous earmark in history would have sent almost $400 million to Alaska to build a bridge—dubbed the Bridge to Nowhere—to an island with about fifty inhabitants.
Esquire also liked Pence because he had once struck a humane tone on the matter of undocumented immigrants, mostly Latin Americans, who had put down roots in the United States. Pence addressed the issue in June 2006 at the Heritage Foundation, one of the primary conservative advocacy groups in the country. Contemplating the immigrants hiding from authorities, Pence declared that “mass deportation is a nonstarter” because “it is not logistically possible to round up twelve million illegal aliens.” He proposed offering incentives for “really good people” who left voluntarily for as little as one week to return legally after applying at centers established in their home countries. Granted temporary work permits, the immigrants would eventually become eligible for more permanent status.
Similar to a proposal made by President George W. Bush, the plan outlined by Pence would have ended a debate over immigration that had begun almost as soon as Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted legal status to millions of people. Reagan had acted out of humanitarian concern and in response to businesspeople who relied on the immigrants for labor in agriculture, construction, and other industries. In the ensuing years, America had grown even more dependent on the labor provided by undocumented workers, so when Pence spoke up, he expressed a position that was favored by the farmers and business managers who were among his most ardent backers at home.
However, Pence’s immigration stance provoked the anger of those Republicans who were hardliners on the issue. Former Nixon speechwriter and onetime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan lacerated Pence in a column published by the conservative weekly Human Events.
A well-practiced fulminator who had reached his sarcastic prime, Buchanan likened Pence to the character Tessio in The Godfather, who betrayed the Corleone family. While using words such as fraudulent and capitulation, Buchanan wrote, “What makes the Pence plan insidious is that Mike Pence has an unimpeachable pedigree.” He concluded that Pence was swayed by “the White House, the ethnic lobbies, the Big Media, mainstream churches, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the ‘conservative’ front groups and foundations they finance, and corporate contributors to congressmen who fear law enforcement.” (Five years earlier, Buchanan had announced, in a book called The Death of the West, that immigration and the decline of white birth rates constituted a threat to the survival of American and European societies. “The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution,” he wrote, adding, “Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry.”)1
The remarkable thing about Buchanan’s list was that it represented a huge swath of American society, from the Chamber of Commerce to churches to corporations to organizations representing Hispanics. If Pence was courting these groups with his immigration position, it may have been a wise choice, as they represented a great many votes and potential campaign donations. At the same time, Indiana was not substantially affected by undocumented immigrants. The best estimates suggested that between fifty-five thousand and eighty-five thousand undocumented people, including children and the unemployed, lived in Indiana. The small number meant that their effect on jobs, ages, and government services was quite minor, and the issue did not matter much to rank-and-file voters in Indiana. For them, especially those who were part of Pence’s Republican base, it was far more important that he preserve his bona fides on issues like abortion and to associate himself with figures whom they respected and admired.2
* * *
Abortion was the topic that welded many evangelical Christians to the Republican Party, and over the years, their importance as a voting bloc had in turn pushed the GOP to adopt opposition to abortion rights as a central tenet. (This despite the fact that significant numbers of Republicans identify as pro-choice.) Among Pence’s early speeches on the House floor was a statement called “The Case for Life,” which was a meandering tour of world history from an antiabortion point of view. It included approving references to John Quincy Adams and Cicero, who “actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion was a capital offense punishable even by death.” In addition to the history, the speech was a complete amalgam of talking points from the antichoice movement, including a callout to the Holocaust with his side of the debate on the role of Oskar Schindler, who saved Jews from the Nazis. He also sounded an alarm about “post-abortion stress syndrome,” which he claimed was seen by “psychologists across America” but was not recognized as an actual pathology by either medical or mental health experts.3
Like his claim about the supposed post-abortion syndrome, much of what Pence argued in his abortion speech, and elsewhere, was drawn from the subculture of Christian Right authorities and could not withstand factual analysis. However, on the floor of the House of Representatives, he was free to say what he liked, and it became part of the Congressional Record. This process resembled his experience on talk radio, where, for hours every day, he was permitted to say pretty much anything, and except on rare occasions, it went unchallenged.
Radio was Pence’s medium and as soon as he had arrived in Washington, he made sure he would maintain some presence on the airwaves back home. With $3,000 from the budget he got to outfit his office, he bought a desk, headphones, a special microphone, and other equipment to establish a broadcast-quality radio studio in a hallway next to the washroom. Within weeks, he was appearing every Monday on the show hosted by his replacement on the Indiana Network, a lawyer named Greg Garrison. On Wednesdays, he called in to stations in Anderson and Columbus, and on occasion, he subbed for weekend hosts at outlets around the state. He also used this little setup to fill in for nationally syndicated radio host Oliver North.
North was a combat veteran and thus even more respected among culture warriors who admired his machismo and bravado. He had been a central figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra Scandal, for which he was fired by the president. He was convicted of three felonies, but the convictions were overturned when a judge found his trial could have been tainted by prior testimony he gave to Congress, for which he had received a promise of immunity from prosecution. A pariah to those who saw him as a rogue officer who broke the law, North was regarded as a defiant hero by many on the hyperpartisan Right. As Pence became his occasional substitute, he made himself known to a national audience of listeners who enjoyed North’s pugnacious style. Although Pence would never match the temperament that moved North to, for example, call the Clinton administration “white trash,” some of the tough-guy aura attached to him merely because he hosted the show. For a politician with a milquetoast image, it was a valuable bit of spice.
The association with North affirmed for fierce conservatives, especially those back home, that Pence was someone whom they could trust. (Pence’s long friendship with Watergate felon turned evangelist Chuck Colson served a similar purpose.) At the same time, people who were put off by Oliver North weren’t likely to ever listen to the program and discover their congressman playing substitute host.
In the mainstream press and in his public appearances, Pence built an identity as the straightest arrow in Congress, a man so concerned about propriety that he told the newspaper The Hill that without his wife by his side, he wouldn’t attend an event where alcohol was served or sit down to a meal with a woman. He said these practices were about avoiding even suspicions of impropriety, adding that he kept in mind the “little old ladies [who] come and say, ‘Honey, whatever you need to do, keep your family together.’” This comment, and Pence’s effort to isolate himself, recalled the ancient Christian regard for women as occasions of sin. This notion, and the matching idea that men are ever poised on the edge of perdition, energizes the sexism that has forever constrained the lives of women and advanced the power of men. In Pence’s case, he was signaling to his religiously oriented supporters that he lived in this world but was not of it, and if he could return society to a past when men and women remained in their separate spheres, he would.4
The puritanism Pence practiced in his personal life was matched by the watchdog role he chose when it came to his peers. He frequently complained about the GOP’s supposed drift away from what he deemed to be its core principles of small government, low taxes, and Christian Right social values. Inside the party caucus, House members waged a continual contest over which items their leaders would push. In this internal fight, Pence chose to stand with a small but loud group that claimed to represent the principled core of the party and attacked those who cooperated with moderates and liberals. He also promoted the interest of major political donors who opposed limits on the money they could pour into candidates’ campaigns.
Campaign spending had begun a steady rise in the mid-1980s, far outpacing inflation, and would soon exceed the rate of growth in health care costs, which was considered a national crisis. By 2000, winning House candidates spent about $1 million to get their jobs, which was almost three times the figure for 1990. Common sense would hold that the candidates who raise and spend the most money are more likely to win and that donors give in order to gain some benefit, whether it is a representative who votes for their interests or will listen when they call.
Political scientists had found that having more money is only a slight advantage in campaigns. (They also confirmed that donors do get attention from politicians.) However, even those who conducted empirical research noted that the psychological effects of fund-raising were greater. “The belief that money is the key to electoral success is almost as damaging as a scenario in which money really does matter,” wrote Steven Levitt in 1994. “As long as conventional wisdom views money as critical, the pattern of behavior that has led to widespread criticism will prevail.”5
The practices that concerned Levitt included all the phone calls, meetings, and travel that House members devoted to raising money, which was amassed in part to intimidate foes. Although senators and representatives generally complained about the duty, it was an accepted part of the job. Like many of his colleagues, Pence made raising campaign funds a regular occupation, even in odd-numbered years when no actual election would be conducted. After winning in 2000, he would raise more than $1 million every year to defeat opponents who ran with ever smaller budgets. In 2010, he would accumulate more than $2.7 million to defeat a rival who reported collecting only 115 dollars. Besides his own campaigns, Pence raised money for his own political action committee (PAC), which then gave money to other Republicans. Borrowing from a Bible verse, this so-called “leadership PAC” was called Principles Exalt a Nation. Essentially a funnel, it took money from the usual Pence donors, including the Kochs, Club for Growth, Cummins, and Erik Prince, and delivered it to politicians, including Christian Right champions such as Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.6
Leadership PACs facilitated the flow of money among politicians who could turn indebted colleagues into allies by funding their election efforts. They also helped donors get around the limits on giving imposed by campaign finance laws. Intended to give the public some sense of how politicians raised money and to limit the appearance of impropriety, these regulations irritated Pence, who was a gifted fund-raiser. In 2002, Pence put his name on a Supreme Court lawsuit filed in response to campaign finance limits proposed by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin. The lead complainant was then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who would become famous for teaching that the three keys to politics are “money, money, money.” The argument, which he and Pence would make, was that money was the equivalent of speech and that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution barred limits on its use to advance candidates. On the first Monday in September 2003, Pence sat in the court to observe the arguments in a case that his side lost. However, he had signaled where he stood.7
As Pence picked his spots on issues and occasionally seized the chance to get ahead of like-minded conservatives, he distinguished himself from others who entered the House in January 2001. Just three years after he arrived in Washington, he got the prized opening-remarks slot at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. (Among the other speakers at CPAC were white supremacist Richard Spencer and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association.) Pence, whose talk was preserved on the CPAC website, began his remarks with imagery he borrowed (uncredited) from Ronald Reagan:
Picture a ship at sea. A proud captain steps onto the sunlit deck as it plies the open seas of a simpler time. Its sails full and straining in the wind, its crew is tried and true, its hull, mast, and keel are strong, but beneath the waves, almost imperceptibly, the rudder has veered off course and, in time, the captain and crew will face unexpected peril. The conservative movement today is like that ship with its proud captain, strong, accomplished, but veering off course into the dangerous and uncharted waters of big-government Republicanism.
According to Pence, expediency had found members of the party embracing programs to solve problems they should stay away from and using tax dollars to fund them. Pence preferred the ethos of the GOP circa 1995, which was led by fire-breathing Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who pushed hard for cuts in federal programs to benefit the poor.
“When I was finally elected in 2000, it was like I had been frozen before the revolution and thawed after it was over. When I first ran, Republicans dreamed of eliminating the Department of Education and returning control of our schools to parents, communities, and states. Ten years later, I was thawed out, took my oath of office, and they handed me a copy of H.R.1. One as in our Republican Congress’ number-one priority. It was the No Child Left Behind Act.”
Intended to benefit kids in poorly performing public schools, the act was proposed by GOP president George Bush and supported by Republican leaders in Congress. It required that states create standards that would have to be met if schools were to get federal funding. The accountability imposed by the act and its focus on basic education were considered conservative policies, and in the first few years, it was credited with raising test scores. However, Pence objected to the spending attached to the bill and voted against it. His side lost.
In the subsequent Congress, after he easily won reelection over Melina Fox, a farmer who had not run for office before, Pence was confronted by a second H.R.1. This one gave senior citizens receiving Medicare a big new benefit for prescription medicines. “To the frozen man,” recalled Pence, “it was obvious: another Congress, another H.R.1, another example of the ship of our movement veering off course.” Pence described Republicans who opposed this Bush plan as “twenty-five rebels [who] made a stand for limited government. When all the votes were counted, we were one rebel short, and the ship of conservative government veered further off course.”
Mixing his military metaphors, Pence briefly evoked the Alamo as he recalled his fellow H.R.1 opponents and then went back to sea—and described a possible mutiny—for the big finish to his talk. He said:
When a ship is approaching a rocky coast, the life of the ship and its crew depends on the navigator with his sextant to counsel the captain and crew to steer clear of the shoals and, if need be, to forcefully oppose the captain when the fate of the ship hangs in the balance. This is our cause. To stand with our captain as he leads us well. And to right the ship where she is adrift.8
A politician who identified himself as a conservative before he was a Republican, Pence put his ideology above his party, his GOP colleagues, and the president. In this way, he stood against the tradition of politics and compromise that marked the entire history of a body charged with serving a vast and diverse nation. Pence affirmed this view by joining the Republican Study Committee (RSC), which was one of many groups with bland names but extreme goals founded in the 1970s by Christian Right activist Paul Weyrich. (Others included the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Krieble Institute, which focused on politics in Russia and Ukraine.) Weyrich was among the first to woo wealthy benefactors to the work of building conservative institutions. Mike Pence considered him a mentor and a close friend.
Weyrich believed that God gave Christians dominion over the earth and that this meant they had been chosen to govern according to their beliefs. He also understood this was a minority view and it might not go over well with an electorate composed of people of many faiths, no faith, and broadly held concern for the separation of church and state. For this reason, he famously complained that “many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome.’ Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”9
In 2002, one of Weyrich’s organizations, the Free Congress Foundation (later called the American Opportunity Foundation), urged members to become propagandists who understand “the truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance.” America was afflicted by “sickness and decay,” wrote Weyrich protégé Eric Heubeck, as he called conservative elites to a constant effort to tear down basic structures of society. “We will not try to reform the existing institutions,” he wrote. “We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them.… We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”
The tactics Heubeck suggested might include, he wrote, having “every member of the movement put a bumper sticker on his car that says something to the effect of ‘Public Education is Rotten; Homeschool Your Kids.’ This will change nobody’s mind immediately; no one will choose to stop sending his children to public schools immediately after seeing such a bumper sticker; but it will raise awareness and consciousness that there is a problem. Most of all, it will contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. We need this if we hope to start picking people off and bringing them over to our side. We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture.”
Besides sowing dissatisfaction, Heubeck’s advocacy jujitsu called for Christian conservatives to assume the posture of a persecuted victim “only interested in being left alone.” With this pose, “we will surely gain the sympathy of the public. The dominant culture will see its life-force being sapped, and it will grow terrified. It will do whatever it takes to destroy its assailant. This will lead to the perception that the dominant leftist culture is empty, hollow, desperate, and has lost its mandate to rule, because its only basis for authority is coercion, much like the communist East Bloc. Sympathy from the American people will increase as our opponents try to persecute us, which means our strength will increase at an accelerating rate due to more defections—and the enemy will collapse as a result.”
The persecution drama Heubeck described was a poor fit for a foundation that had received tens of millions of dollars from wealthy donors, but it was consistent with other narratives promoted by conservative activists. The Christian Right, which operated in a nation where God is mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance and is printed on its currency, nevertheless claimed victim status. This way of thinking saw a “war on Christmas” in the phrase “Happy Holidays” and a threat to heterosexuals in extending the legal right to marry to gay and lesbian couples. In this way, every time society granted more people fuller participation in any realm, Heubeck and others could claim that their side was losing something. By building up a sense of threat and loss, Heubeck could create a dramatic, energizing narrative of a people in the wilderness fighting a terrible foe. “Popular culture now acts as a giant narcotic, offering an escape from the difficulty and hard work of realizing our higher selves,” he announced. “Our movement’s intention is to break that addiction for as many individuals as possible.”10
* * *
Like Heubeck, Mike Pence had a flair for the dramatic. However, he possessed a limited repertoire and tended to repeat himself. After joining Paul Weyrich’s Republican Study Committee, which sought to push GOP House members ever rightward, Pence repeated his seafaring story in another speech on the dangerous state of public affairs. He began, “Picture, if you will, a ship at sea. Shoulders back, a proud captain steps onto the sunlit deck of a tall ship plying the open seas of a simpler time. Its sails are full and straining in the wind. Its crew is tried and true; its hull, mast, and keel are strong. But beneath the waves…”
One again calling himself the “frozen man,” Pence again described his two rebellious votes against GOP leaders as heroic choices. He ended, however, with an optimistic observation about what he saw as President Bush’s course correction. “After weeks of confusion from Massachusetts to California,” Pence said, “this president has brought moral clarity to the debate over same-sex marriage by calling on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to protect marriage. The president rightly called marriage ‘the most enduring human institution,’ and so it is. Marriage was ordained by God, confirmed by law, is the glue of the American family, and is the safest harbor for children.”
The danger children faced, and which required “safe harbor,” in Pence’s view, was same-sex marriage. In Massachusetts, the State Supreme Court had recently determined that gay citizens should be permitted to marry, noting that “barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution.” In California, a new civil partnership law had given gay couples all the legal rights and benefits of marriage. President Bush’s response, which Pence supported, came at a press conference where he said, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another.”
Bush sounded as if he favored the social conservatives in the matter, but he moderated his statement with the observation that he thought it was “important for society to welcome each individual.” Society had been moving in this direction, granting ever-greater acceptance to gay Americans. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court had struck down state laws that criminalized homosexual behavior, and public opinion polls were beginning to show a gradual, steady rise in public acceptance of homosexuality. However, this trend was being driven by a faster shift in opinion among younger people, who were not as likely to vote as older citizens. Also, the Supreme Court ruling and changes in certain states had alarmed Christian Right activists who once again saw that liberal courts were working against them. GOP strategists, believing these voters could be mobilized by appeals to their fear, just as gun owners were rallied by NRA warnings about the specter of regulations, moved to make opposition to marriage equality a centerpiece of 2004 political campaigns.11
Bush’s chief policy advisor, Karl Rove, concluded that conservative Christians, who naturally favored his candidate, would be more likely to come to the polls if they had a chance to fight the acceptance of gay citizens by voting to amend state constitutions to ban same-sex unions. (Writer Andrew Sullivan reported that Rove “told gay Republicans … the only thing that mattered to him was there were more votes in gay-bashing than in standing up to the bigots in his base.”) In prior election cycles, Rove-run campaigns, assuming they could energize bigoted voters, had used rumormongering to suggest opponents were homosexual. This tactic was especially wicked as used by Rove, since his parents had divorced when his father announced he was gay.12
In 2004, the Rove-led GOP would push for anti–gay marriage amendments to state constitutions. This state-by-state approach promised anti-equality Republicans a better chance to pick up votes in key spots, even though the national tide was moving against them. This problem was borne out by a January 2004 poll commissioned by the Christian Right–oriented American Family Association, which showed that 60 percent of respondents favored legalizing gay marriage, 8 percent approved of civil unions for gay people, and only 32 percent wanted to ban legal status for gay couples.13
In social and political terms, Indiana seemed a likely place for an anti–gay marriage amendment. However, statutes already barred same-sex unions, and no judges, clergy, or couples had attempted to defy the law. With nothing to rile Christian Right activists, no groundswell developed to drive an amendment campaign. However, Congressman Pence, spying an opportunity, moved quickly to identify himself with the issue. At the start of 2004, he announced he was a coauthor of an anti–marriage equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution and began promoting it across his district.
On a Thursday night in February 2004, Pence faced a crowd of people at a local civic center in Columbus and tried to get them interested in the gay marriage issue. It was a struggle, as they were far more interested in the war in Iraq. Already costing far more than the Bush administration had projected, the war was part of America’s response to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. However, Iraq had no link to the attacks, and administration claims that its dictator, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction had proven to be false. “Weapons of mass disappearance” was how a veteran who stood to address Pence described them. Pence replied that Saddam was himself a dangerous weapon. This argument didn’t impress the crowd, but Pence had little to worry about with voters. Having defeated his previous opponent by thirty points, he didn’t yet have an opponent for November. Still, he had made a continuous effort to raise money and, in the off year, had collected $570,000. When a challenger finally arose, she was able to collect only $50,000 for her entire campaign and was swamped by thirty-seven points.14
In 2004, in each of the eleven states where they were proposed, voters approved anti–gay marriage initiatives. However, each one of them would eventually be overturned by the courts. In the meantime, the federal constitutional amendment Pence proposed never became more than something to talk about. President Bush all but declared the proposal to be a political stunt when, two months after the election, he announced he wouldn’t push for it because he had come to deem it unnecessary. Mike Pence did not follow Bush. Secure in his district, which he kept winning by higher margins, Pence kept talking about gay marriage and other social issues even in places like his hometown of Columbus, where Cummins Engine had promoted a more liberal social agenda and voters did not prioritize these concerns.
Pence’s great power at the ballot box was enhanced by the squeaky-clean image he maintained in the press. Where others were damaged by personal problems, family difficulties, or financial issues, he went untouched by these kinds of challenges. The closest he came to this kind of trouble might have been on the occasion of the bankruptcy that announced the abrupt death of the Pence family business, Kiel Brothers. With more than two hundred convenience stores/gas stations and a wholesale petroleum business, the company had lost the confidence of the bankers who provided the credit to keep it going. In part, the trouble was a matter of the difficulty of competing in a business with little room for error. However, under Pence’s brother Greg, who ran it after their father died, Kiel Brothers had not kept pace with rivals who had newer stores in better locations. Despite doing more than $340 million per year in business, the firm went into decline.
As one of the lawyers who worked with Kiel Brothers would eventually recall, only a steady effort to rejuvenate the chain would have extended its life, and in the end, the bankers wouldn’t back such an effort. But even considering the causes, the firm’s condition was remarkably bad. Kiel Brothers owed vendors, workers, and others more than $100 million, with $9 million due to the State of Indiana, mainly for environmental cleanups at its facilities. When the assets were finally liquidated, most of the creditors received about fifty cents on the dollar. One of the losers was Mike Pence, who previously had income from his ownership stake but lost the value of his stock, which had been estimated between $100,000 and $250,000.15
While some political opponents tried to make an issue out of Kiel Brothers, it never caused much trouble for Pence in elections. Indeed, every time he ran, he won by a greater margin, and this popularity with voters freed him to do things that might have been difficult for another conservative. An example arose in the weeks after the 2004 election, when a woman from Sierra Leone was stopped for speeding in her car in Muncie and was arrested when police discovered a fifteen-year-old deportation order issued when she had been divorced and her husband reported her to authorities. Pence’s intervention with the Department of Homeland Security worked: the deportation order was dropped. The congressman said he was moved to tears by the outcome. She “belongs with her family,” he said.16
As he helped a woman whose dilemma had become a cause célèbre in Indiana, Pence showed himself to be a compassionate conservative at home even as he struck a more doctrinaire pose in Washington. In 2005, he was elected chairman of Weyrich’s Republican Study Committee, which had grown to more than one hundred members and sometimes challenged party leaders for control of the GOP agenda in the House. More committed to ideological purity than rank-and-file Republicans, the RSC functioned much like other interest groups that pushed the party rightward. While electioneering organizations like the Club for Growth used money and primary challenges to this purpose, the RSC organized its members to vote as a bloc, thereby threatening efforts that House leaders might make to pass legislation.
On social issues, the group took cues from leading Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family, which was run by psychologist James Dobson. The son of a traveling evangelist, Dobson first gained fame in the 1970s as a proponent of corporal punishment for children. With broadcasts, publications, conferences, and other activities, Focus on the Family promoted prayer in public schools, abstinence-only sex education, and the notion that God’s acts and not evolution accounted for life on Earth. Dobson was stridently opposed to marriage equality and even operated a ministry that sought to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women. (After it was sold to other operators, this ministry was shut down and its managers apologized for harming participants in its programs.)
Under Pence, the study committee pushed for spending cuts to offset billions in relief after Hurricane Katrina (the proposal was defeated) and mounted a failing effort to allow some Social Security funds to be invested in private accounts. Both ideas were political poison with general election voters, and GOP leaders were never going to let them be approved. The push-pull between the study committee and GOP leaders often strained their relationships. At one point, after his old friends Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay read him the riot act, a chastened Pence hustled to an engagement at the Longworth House Office Building, where he abandoned the text of a speech he was about to give on the “massive spending splurges” indulged by his colleagues. Instead, he told a crowd of young conservatives, “I believe in the leadership of this Congress. I believe in the men and women who lead the House of Representatives and the Senate. I see them as men and women of integrity and principle, who work every day to bring the ideals of our Founders into the well of the people’s house.”17 This abject pandering was noted in the press as something that should have embarrassed Pence but it foreshadowed much more craven capitulation to come.
* * *
Embarrassing as it may have been to read about it in the newspaper, Pence’s tail-between-the-legs retreat showed he knew how to be a team player when it was required. Pence wanted to become more powerful within the GOP establishment, and to that end, he had tried to get along with Hastert and DeLay when he could and did what he could to help his party raise money. Whenever possible, he showed his support for his colleagues, even if it meant answering tough questions back in Indiana. For example, when he voted to increase the salaries paid to members of Congress, which was not a popular cause among fiscal conservatives, he explained it by saying, “I fear Mrs. Pence more than I fear voters.” This was, no doubt, true.18
In 2006, as his party lost control of the House, which they had captured in 1994, Pence saw his chance to reach for a big prize: the post of minority leader. “We didn’t just lose our majority,” said Pence as he announced his bid, “we lost our way. In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education, entitlements, and pursued spending policies that created record deficits and national debt.”
Unmentioned, but obviously the target of Pence’s critique, were outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert and majority leader Representative John Boehner of Ohio. (Boehner had assumed the office when predecessor Tom DeLay had been indicted and resigned.) Ten years Pence’s senior in the House, Boehner was one of the best-liked members of Congress. An old-school politician, he was willing to practice give-and-take within his party, which meant that he had helped many members, including lots of those who belonged to the RSC. However, as the two men pursued the job, Pence only seemed to win over people who couldn’t cast votes. Archconservative pundits like Phil Kerpen of Human Events favored him because he had supported their agenda by voting against Medicare drug benefits and seeking to change Social Security. Politicians who were sensitive to what voters preferred tended to oppose these ideas, which might explain why they failed and why Boehner clobbered Pence in the leadership race by 168 to 27.19
Some congressional Republicans suspected that Pence’s bid for the minority leader post was not truly sincere and that he might have acted with Boehner’s secret encouragement. Better to have a contest, went this line, than a coronation. Two years later, when Pence wanted the job of House conference chairman, Boehner supported him. The office was concerned with making sure the process of lawmaking worked smoothly, and Pence would do it well. Pence would also do well by colleagues who wanted to make sure that donations from wealthy Christian conservatives continued to flow. This work required the ability to speak the religiously imbued dialect of Christian Right politics and a willingness to stroke egos when necessary.
In December 2007, Pence showed his flair for ego-stroking when he organized House members to hold a reception for wealthy heir and businessman Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, a private military company that had contracted with the U.S. military to provide security services. Four months before Pence’s show of support, on September 16, 2007, Blackwater guards had opened fire while accompanying a U.S. convoy at Nisour Square in Baghdad, killing seventeen civilians and wounding twenty others. (Four Blackwater guards were eventually charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison for their roles in the massacre. One of these men successfully petitioned to have his conviction voided and was to be retried.)
In addition to being Pence’s friend, Prince had given more than $230,000 to GOP causes between 1992 and the time of the get-together. (His family, likely the wealthiest in the state of Michigan—his sister was billionaire education funder Betsy DeVos—had given more.) Prince’s private military force had a $1 billion contract to provide services in Iraq. It billed the U.S. taxpayers roughly $450,000 per year per man deployed in the country, which was about six times the amount paid to an American soldier. This was privatization—the concept of transferring government functions to businesses—in action.20
For Blackwater’s Prince, politics, business, and religion flowed together in a life that found him in frequent contact with the same people; Mike Pence shared values with Prince and like-minded friends, including James Dobson, whose Focus on the Family also received Prince’s money, and broadcaster/evangelist D. James Kennedy. The mutual support in these relationships formed an informal circuit that was common to the Christian Right political subculture and reinforced by money and displays of mutual admiration. Donors like Prince gave comparatively small sums to see their views promoted and, in his case, received $1 billion worth of government work. Politicians and advocates advanced thanks to the contributions from their benefactors.
Receptions like the one Pence arranged with Republicans in Congress were part of the exchange that kept the Christian Right movement going. So too was the award Pence received—Distinguished Christian Statesman—from D. James Kennedy’s Center for Christian Statesmanship. The center offered a three-week course to attendees, who were called “fellows” but who paid ($16,000 as of 2018), to study subjects such as Bible-based economics and strategies to oppose equal rights for lesbian, gay, and transgender citizens. Previous award winners included Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, who was removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he refused a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from state grounds. (Moore later lost a run for U.S. Senate after testimony from women who said he had inappropriate sexual or social contact with them as teenagers when he was a prosecutor in the 1970s.)21
Roy Moore and Mike Pence were not likely candidates for the types of honors bestowed on public servants by great institutions. Distinguished Christian Statesman was not comparable to, say, an honorary doctorate at an Ivy League university. However, for the cost of a plaque, a photo opportunity could be created, which might be useful to both the giver and receiver. In this case, supporters gathered at a dinner where, afterward, Pence and his wife, Karen, stood for a picture that was then distributed nationwide by an outfit called PR Newswire, which functions as a self-promoter’s version of the Associated Press.
The statesman award was one of many signs of Pence’s high status within the Christian Right movement. More significant was his involvement with a secretive group known as both the Family and the Fellowship, which spread a kind of elitist fundamentalism by cultivating powerful believers and gathering them together. Led by a charismatic figure named Douglas Coe, the Family housed members of Congress at a house on Capitol Hill, offered leadership training and other services at its headquarters in Virginia, and maintained a network of thousands of members and friends who helped one another with everything from business deals to spiritual crises. It was best known for organizing an annual prayer breakfast attended by many officials in Washington and invited guests from around the globe.
Founded in 1942 by an anti-union, anti–New Deal, anti-Communist Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide, the Family promotes capitalism and Republican-leaning politics at home and what it considers to be American/Christian interests abroad. Vereide was, for example, opposed to the creation of Israel on the grounds that a Jewish state was inconsistent with the “divine plan as declared in the Bible.” The organization’s view on Israel changed as many evangelicals turned to a nineteenth-century theory that the Bible foretold the creation of the Jewish state as a condition of Christ’s return to Earth. This view imagined that God planned the future as a series of events that would work, like tumblers in a lock, to eventually return Jesus to reign over Earth. The establishment of modern Israel was key to the plan and would be followed by the Rapture, during which believers would rise to heaven, leaving others to endure an agonizing period called the Great Tribulation. Under these conditions, Jews would have the opportunity to convert or be consigned to hell. Either way, Zionism would play an essential role in fulfilling Christianity’s dream of paradise.22
The supernatural Christian view of events supplied an exciting narrative for understanding current events. It was popularized by a flood of books, which began with evangelist Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. Lindsey cherry-picked current events, ignoring progress in science, medicine, and even the cause of peace to create the sense that a crisis was building. He expected the Rapture to come in the 1980s. Although it didn’t, his book kept selling, eventually reaching twenty-eight million copies sold worldwide. The book would inspire hundreds of imitators and even a shelf full of apocalyptic books for children and young adults.
End-times fervor was, and is, common in the growing number of churches and organizations where the absence of a hierarchy encourages a freewheeling approach to belief. The Family falls into this larger trend, which finds Americans moving away from the structure of churches, denominations, and doctrine in favor of a spiritual commitment to the love of a supernatural Jesus. In this version of American Christianity, a supernatural relationship with Jesus is primary, and individuals choose their own moral codes. (Deep concern for common morals and ethics is, in this view, a negative practice called legalism. Legalism is bad because it promotes such behavior as humility or charity while ignoring the notion that a profession of belief, offered at any point, outweighs all the good or evil that a person ever does.)
Although faith is enough for any Christian to find eternal reward in heaven, the Family’s leaders considered the Bible stories of Jesus and his early followers and concluded that even today, on a supernatural basis, some people are held closer to Him than others. It is this favored position, preordained by God, that explains their worldly success. As one of the Family’s documents notes, Jesus has “levels of relationships much like concentric rings.” His favorites are obviously those He enabled to be powerful, including high-ranking politicians and businesspeople.
Coe promoted the notion that God works through powerful “key men” who can create His dominion on Earth. With God’s endorsement, key men have justification for violating social norms and common ethics, and their successes are more evidence of God’s favor. And just as God’s will should be obeyed, superior men and women deserved the obedience of their lessers. This self-reinforcing logic meant that insiders could be forgiven almost anything—past, present, or future—once they professed their faith. As a result, criminals, dictators, and mass murderers like Indonesia’s Suharto have all been counted as members or friends who could be useful and may be God’s tools for His work on Earth.
To reach key men and promote its view of Christian government, the Family funds trips abroad for members of Congress and others. Senators and House members travel on the group’s dime but arrive in the Middle East, Asia, or elsewhere, with their status as American officials well understood. The difference is that their mission is devoted to the Family’s Christian Right goals. On these missions, Americans meet and encourage locals who are friendly to the cause. In Africa, for example, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, was identified as a key man despite documented human rights abuses of his regime. The Family worked through him—it sent members of Congress to Uganda—to promote antigay initiatives, including a call to institute the death penalty for some homosexual conduct.23
Although the Family uses members to promote its favored ideals, the exploitation is mutual, as members use the organization to cultivate friendship and business contacts. In this way, the Family functions like a fraternal organization on steroids, where wealth and power are displayed and celebrated and can be amplified through relationships. As Michael Cromartie of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center told The New Yorker in 2010, “You bring an oligarch over to the Cedars and he says, ‘Ah, these are my kind of people. They have pictures on the wall of all these presidents, they seem to be in touch with power, they know people with money, this will help my business.’”
Among members and friends of the Family, Congressman Mike Pence would be a midlevel figure ranked below senators and better-known national Christian activists like his friend Charles Colson. However, he was ranked closer to God than most other mortals. And like so many whom the Family drew close, he was still on the rise. Pence became more visible as an outspoken critic of most of the policies Barack Obama proposed after Obama became president in 2008. At the same time, Pence aligned himself ever more closely with groups sponsored by the industry billionaires Charles and David Koch.
In April 2009, Pence signed a pledge, which had been distributed by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, announcing he would vote against any program that would increase federal revenues in order to combat climate change. This meant he would oppose a so-called carbon tax on the pollutants that caused climate change, which Koch-owned facilities spewed at a rate of twenty-four million tons per year. Echoing the Kochs’ false claim that a proposed carbon levy would be the largest tax increase in history, Pence was a leader of the effort that defeated a “cap and trade” plan that would have limited carbon emissions and created a market for credits that polluters could earn and trade for reducing their output.
Pence also became a leading promoter of the so-called Tea Party movement, which various powerful conservative organizations helped to create in response to Obama. Typical was an Americans for Prosperity spin-off called FreedomWorks, which was led by former congressman Dick Armey and helped organize protests that were intended to draw greater numbers of people to rally against Obama policies. A classic example of a practice called astroturfing, these efforts mimicked grassroots protest movements. In September 2009, Mike Pence joined Armey at a FreedomWorks rally at the United States Capitol. He stood in shirtsleeves and told the crowd, “I’m Mike Pence, and I’m from Indiana.”
With the same clear, broadcaster’s tone he offered at the 2000 Republican National Convention, the voice Pence used sounded cheerful, but his message was ominous. Squinting at the sun, he said that because of Obama’s proposed health care plan, the nation risked “the abyss that has swallowed much of Europe in an avalanche of socialism.” A year later, after the health care plan was enacted and no abyss swallowed the nation, Pence spoke at another rally organized by the same group on the same spot and made the upcoming congressional election a matter of existential concern. “If we do not succeed in November, all that once was good and great about this country could someday be gone.”24