STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Terry Rex Duling, in a comment on my “Dufo, What a Crazy Guy” post, points out the biggest downside of a Trump impeachment – President Mike Pence.  Frying pan, meet fire.  The mind reels. 

My Indiana friends know more about Pious Pence than I do.  Wikipedia says that he was a right wing talk show host, a Tea Party congressman, and governor of Indiana.  I first heard of him in 2015, when he signed Indiana’s so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” a transparent attempt to legalize discrimination against LGBT people. 

Arizona’s Republican governor Jan Brewer vetoed a similar bill in 2014, so it’s fair to conclude that Mike Pence is both more conservative than Brewer (whose claim to fame was that she wagged her finger in President Obama’s face), and also dumber.  Brewer knew what happened when Arizona Governor Ev Mecham repealed the Martin Luther King holiday in 1987.  There was a huge national backlash, and bye-bye Super Bowl.

Sure enough, Pence was faced with the threat of boycotts from the NBA, the NCAA, as well as Subaru USA and Angie’s List.  Pence signed legislation that appears to have defanged the law for all practical purposes.  I’ve read that Pence was pretty unpopular by the end of his first term as governor. 

Then fate, in the form of Paul Manafort, stepped in.  Yes, the very same Paul Manafort who is under indictment from Robert Mueller made Mike Pence Vice President.  Donald Trump reportedly wanted Chris Christie as his running mate, but Manafort pushed hard for Pence.  He even lied to Trump about a non-existent mechanical problem with Trump’s plane to keep him in Indianapolis.  Trump spent the evening with Pence, and the rest is history.  It would be interesting to know how and why Manafort became such a fan of Mike Pence. 

But wait – there’s more!  Pence’s potential Russian connections don’t stop with Manafort.  Remember that Donald Trump claimed that he fired Mike Flynn not for unauthorized contacts with Russians, but for lying to Mike Pence about those Russian contacts.  That always seemed fishy to me. 

Yesterday, Flynn’s son tweeted that his father “did not lie to Pence (or anyone else in the admin) about his perfectly legal and appropriate conversations w Russian AMB Kislyak in Dec 2016.  Why would a highly decorated military intel officer lie about something legal?” 

That’s a great question, Mike Flynn Jr.  Especially since your highly decorated dad later lied to the FBI about exactly that. 

Why would Flynn Sr. tell Pence the truth and lie to the FBI?  Lying to the VP might not be a good idea, but lying to the FBI is a crime by definition.  Curioser and curioser. 

Of course, it’s always possible that Flynn Jr. is simply lying.  Maybe lying just runs in the family.  Pence has been as vague as possible on the matter while providing cover for Trump’s story.  But there are some important unanswered questions about connections between Pence and Russia.  I hope Robert Mueller clears that up someday.

Be that as it may, let us gird our loins and consider the hypothetical presidency of Michael Richard Pence, 46th president of the USA.  We’ll set aside the question of what happened to Donald Trump in this scenario.  Maybe he decided he’d rather play golf seven days a week instead of just two or three.  Maybe a health problem surfaced.  Or maybe a Democratic wave in 2018 made the surviving congressional Republicans mad enough to put impeachment in play in 2019.  For the sake of the argument, we’ll just stipulate that, however it happened, 45 is gone sometime in 2019 or early 2020.

Terry notes that 46 would be a good deal more dignified than 45, which would win him friends in the press.  My guess is that the dominant media narrative would be something like, “Let us be grateful that our long national nightmare is over.  Let us put aside partisan differences and unite behind President Pence.”

Mike Pence is religious in a way that no president has been since maybe ever.  But I can’t see a path to implementing a religious agenda in 21st century America.  Republican control of Congress is likely to be broken, at least in the House.  And however popular Pence may be inside his own party, he doesn’t have Trump’s sleazy charisma.  He won’t be able to rouse the rabble the way Trump did.  He’d enjoy a short-lived burst of good will, and then reality would set in.  If Governor Mike Pence couldn’t turn Indiana into the Republic of Gilead, he won’t make much headway in a largely secular nation of 325 million people.

I say “largely secular” not because I think that most Americans aren’t religious or spiritual in some way, but because I believe that most religious/spiritual Americans understand instinctively that they can’t forcibly convert millions of their fellow citizens to the One True Path, whatever they imagine it to be.  The only way for 325 million people to get along is to live and let live.  Disagree without being disagreeable, and all those civics class clichés.  That’s how we keep the United States united.

What we’re left with, though, is the uncomfortable fact that a substantial cohort of American voters, perhaps as many as 30%, responded to Donald Trump’s siren song.  If we’re lucky, the 2018 and 2020 elections may put them in their place temporarily, but they are a large enough cohort to represent a real impediment to small-d democratic government.  The passage of time will probably reduce their numbers, since older white folks make up a disproportionate percentage of these dead-enders. 

But there are entire regions in America where a right-wing white Christian monoculture has deep roots.  They have become a minority group, and they hate it.  They don’t want to live and let live.  If conversion by the sword was good enough for medieval Christians (and Muslims too, it must be said), then by golly it’s good enough for them.  Only with assault rifles this time around. 

Dealing with this cohort compassionately but firmly will be the greatest challenge Democrats face in future presidential elections. 

The image that accompanies this post is a map of the results of the 2016 presidential election by county.  There are a helluva lot of red counties.  The good news is that most of them are sparsely populated.  The bad news is that the Electoral College was constructed to reward rural regions at the expense of more populous urban areas.  The inherent small state bias of the Electoral College (where a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times as much as a vote in California) handed the 2016 election to Trump. 

It’s important to remember that Hillary Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump.  A shift of only 100,000 votes in three states would have changed the outcome in the Electoral College.  In the short term, what Democrats need to do is find a way to shift those 100,000 votes.  I think that’s eminently doable.  I expect it to happen, regardless of whether Donald Trump or Mike Pence is the Republican standard bearer in 2020.

In the long term, if I were a Democratic Party strategist, I’d make the abolition of the Electoral College and the direct popular election of the president one of my top priorities.