Mike Penance
America's tube sock runs for President
Good news if you are the kind of person who finds ketchup “too spicy” – Mike Pence is running for President! Which raises the question – why?
Nobody likes him. I don’t mean personally – I’m sure Mother thinks well enough of him – and no doubt he has a devoted circle of friends and fellow milk sippers. I mean, nobody likes him politically. Pence is a politician without a constituency, a pastor without a flock. How galling to spend four years scraping and groveling to man he must have found reprehensible only to be rewarded with calls for his lynching on his way out the door.
To be fair, Trump didn’t explicitly endorse those who wanted to hang Mike Pence, he just didn’t not endorse them. Now Mike Pence wants those people’s votes? Some might make the argument that no politician has ever successfully gone from fleeing for his life from his own supporters to convincing those same people to elect him President four years later. In fact, I would make that argument although, in fairness, there isn’t a lot of precedent.
Still, though, you have to ask yourself - to whom does this guy appeal?
Pence is like Mitt Romney without the sparkling personality. He’s a man so blanched he might as well be a can of low-sodium green beans. He’s Bizarro Pinocchio – a real human boy who got his wish to become a wooden puppet. He’s America’s tube sock. How does a man like that expect to outshine Donald Trump? How does a man like that expect to outshine Asa Hutchinson?
I understand that many people who run for President aren’t actually trying to get the job. Some want attention or to fundraise or to be considered for top slots in a future administration. Some, like Chris Christie and Robert Kennedy Jr. are just trying to be dicks. But Pence is in a different category, a seasoned politician whose resume should put him in the top tier of candidates but whose personality and record make his unelectable to his “base.” Consider this fact: in Iowa – conservative Iowa – he is currently polling only one percent higher than I am.
So what is he doing?
Perhaps this is some sort of penance for serving as Trump’s VP. Maybe self-abnegation is the only way to rid himself of the stink that clings to him like so much Trump cologne.
Or maybe he’s just a fucking idiot who thinks he can win.
I tend to think it’s the latter. We’ve heard so much talk in recent election cycles about being “called to serve.” How many politicians have told us God asked them to run for office? (And how many of them have actually won?) I don’t remember Pence ever saying anything so nakedly self-serving, but then again, I don’t remember anything he’s ever said about anything. Even so, doesn’t a holy mission seem to fit the pattern of everything we know about Mike Pence?
Actually, now that I think of it, what do we know about Mike Pence? Other than the fact that he’s a deeply religious conservative Christian, I don’t know a thing about him. For a guy who spent four years on the national stage, it seems like we the people should have a better sense of Mike Pence as a man. I have none. The the other day I saw a picture of him straddling a motorcycle. Does Mike Pence ride motorcycles? If he does, no part of me believes that it’s because Mike Pence enjoys riding motorcycles, only that somebody told him he should. Which begs the question: does Mike Pence know he’s a replicant?
One of the refreshing changes in American politics over the last couple election cycles is the emergence of actual human beings with actual personalities running, and winning, elected office. Donald Trump has a personality. It’s rancid, sure, but he feels authentically himself. So do AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Hakeem Jeffries and a host of others from both sides. Pence is a throwback to yesteryear’s Manchurian candidates. They are the people for whom the term “empty suit” was invented.
A winning personality shouldn’t be a prerequisite for an officeholder but I have to question somebody who has obviously done everything in his power to scrub himself of his own humanity. It’s like he ran himself through the whites cycle of his washing machine a million too many times.
I don’t know much but I know this - a man like that cannot win.
I hope Mike Pence enjoys his run for the presidency. I hope it scratches whatever itch Mother cannot reach. But I do not wish him well. And I hope when this is over, I hope he gets on his motorcycles and returns to Geppetto’s shop for good.