Mike Pence Comes out of the Shadows

On the occasion of the publishing of his new book, Mike Pence has been on the airwaves daily recently. Most notably, he had a "Town Hall" with CNN's Jake Tapper this past Wednesday evening. While he deserves credit for coming onto a live broadcast for more than an hour, there were a number of aspects of his appearance which I found irritating.

1. Repeatedly plugging his book. Instead of simply answering questions, he prefaced nearly every answer with "As I say in my book..." After awhile this beame obnoxious. The in-your-face plugging leads one to wonder if the man is broke.

2. Criticizing the 1/6 committee as biased. Here Pence was way off base. Tapper had to interject and remind Pence that the Democrats had proposed a bi-partisan committee to investigate, but "McCarthy killed it".

3. Not answering questions. The most outrageous example of this was in response to a queston on abortion. Instead of speaking to the substance of the question, which was about a nationwide ban on abortion, Pence gave a speech about how he has reverence for life. He said nothing about why his religious beliefs should apply to the whole country. After this non-answer, I began to realize that there was a non-responsiveness to most of the questions put to him.

4. Testifying. Pence has repeatedly said that "The Committee has no right to my testimony", referring to the 1/6 committee. He has also said his appearance would be "unprecedented", which ignores Gerald Ford's tetimony before a Copngressional committee seeking to put to rest claims that his pardon of Nixon was part of a quid pro quo. It also ignores the role of the Congress in its oversight function of the administrative branch. Pence rants and raves about "separation of powers", failing to understand the oversight role assigned to Congress.

Pence has an image of a dull, drab campaigner, and I don't see any signs that this will change in the coming election cycle. I think a good comparison would be to Dan Quayle, who ran for the GOP nomination in 1996, after losing the 1992 election running with George H.W. Bush. Quayle never got any traction at all, and his campaign went nowhere. Pence wil suffer the same fate if he runs in 2024, as he is clearly considering doing.

Rule by the Best and the Brightest

George Will wrote a thought-provoking column a few months back on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Halberstam book "The Best and the Brightest". Will spends the whole column, up until the last paragraph, outlining the problems with academics trying to govern, which was the problem that got us into the quagmire of Vietnam. Some statements: "academia is an unsatisfactory incubator of statesmen", and "the perils of academic intelligence unleavened by wisdom acquired in the wider world", and "academic careers can make people susceptible to self-deception because they have been socialized in a world of theory in which their ideas have no consequences". But then comes his last paragraph, ending with "the best and the brightest can be tiresome, but the alternative even more so". Much food for thought here. I just finished a new biography of Andrew Jackson entitled "The First Populist", and his story certainly illustrates the dangers of the alternative to rule by the best and the brightest, which is a mindless populism fueled by a strong, charismatic leader. My son-in-law says that we have a kakistocracy, which is rule by the least competent. I can't argue with him.