Bye, Mike
Pence completes the transition from valued conservative to irrelevant loser.
by Scott McKay
March 14, 2023, 11:02 PM
While giving the keynote speech at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa last year, Tucker Carlson offered an interesting bit of advice to conservative voters more and more alienated from the political class even in the Republican Party.
Carlson offered a number of items, some of which were a bit off the beaten track — support politicians who pursue beauty in public life was one. But perhaps the most salient of his offerings was this: “You need to be really wary of candidates who care what the New York Times thinks.”
Carlson’s remarks were mostly intended, people thought, as a shot at Nikki Haley — and rightly so.
But it turns out they hit home most of all with respect to Mike Pence, who made a political brand more than a decade ago as a politician who legitimately couldn’t care less about the propagandist legacy media.
That seems so long ago, doesn’t it?
Over the weekend, Pence showed up at the Gridiron dinner, one of the hoity-toity events in Washington in which the nation’s elite news media figures gather to congratulate themselves for another year of slavery to conventional wisdom and diminution of journalistic ethics and credibility, and sucked up to the audience in ways a John McCain or Mitt Romney would be envious of.
“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence told hundreds of journalists at what is typically a jocular white-tie affair. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Trump was wrong. His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
Pence had used similar words to talk about Trump in his book — writing that his former boss’ “reckless words had endangered my family and all those serving at the Capitol.”
But his advisers saw the Gridiron dinner as an opportunity not just to echo those sentiments but to amplify them. They also believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists who have given him short shrift in the early 2024 primary.
“This was a different audience for him,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former vice presidential chief of staff and his senior adviser.
Pence world has long believed that the former congressman and Indiana governor could occupy the adult-in-a-room 2024 lane, in that he is uniquely positioned to speak truth to power now that he is free of the constraints of the vice presidency.
“Mike is in a different place where he can be sort of free and liberated in ways that I don’t think others in the field are,” Short said. “And so I’m not looking at it as to where he is at this moment. I believe that he’s got a good pathway forward.”
more
https://spectator.org/bye-mike/
