Pence is determined to stick around
Thomas Marshall, whom you very likely have never heard of, served as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president and is known for his declaration that what America needed was a good five-cent cigar. But he also is the man who used to tell the story of two brothers, one who went to sea and was drowned and the other who became vice president of the United States. Neither was ever heard from again. There are two things about the current vice president upon which almost everyone can agree. Mike Pence is not at sea. And he is determined to be heard from again.
Thus the remarkable few days that the onetime Republican governor of Indiana has experienced in the public prints. First was an astonishing column by the conservative commentator George F. Will, who characterized Mr. Pence as “oozing unctuousness from every pore” and who painted him as a hopeless, total toady.
Then came a New York Times report suggesting the White House increasingly considers the vice president a scheming opportunist blinded by ambition, perhaps reaching for the main prize himself.
White House palace protectors almost certainly would dismiss both critiques as bleats from a dying mainstream media commentariat.
One way or another, this is a season for fresh attention on the vice president, which itself is a statement of some moment. Vice presidents often have been so obscure, and their activities so obscured, that no one paid any attention to them at all.
Lyndon Johnson had stridden the Capitol like a colossus when he was Senate majority leader, but he chafed at being John F. Kennedy’s vice president. Johnson was a brooder even in better days, but he was a caged animal as second-incommand, eventually falling into a visible depression.
One day his personal secretary, Juanita Roberts, pushed Johnson — descendant of Confederate soldiers — to consider a Memorial Day speech at Gettysburg. He resisted, she pushed. And then, 55 years ago this month, he delivered a speech that was an uplifting bookend to Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and that has been credited for nudging Kennedy to give his landmark civil rights speech less than a month later.
“It is a tough and unique job, taking someone at the top of his or her profession and making that person totally subservient,” says Joel Goldstein, the Saint Louis University law professor whose “The White House Vice Presidency” examines the recent growth of the post.
“The position takes leaders and makes them followers. The vice president is always advancing someone else’s agenda.”
Trump loyalists are alarmed Pence has taken such a forward role in this fall’s midterm elections. Much of the criticism is aimed at the presence of Nick Ayers, a wunderkind strategist steeped more in campaigning than in governing, in Pence’s circle.
Pence, almost alone among Trump insiders, is a veteran politician, chosen as running mate either because no one else would take it, or because he possessed the political experience (member of the House, governor of a state) that complemented Trump’s status as outsider and disrupter.
Either way, Pence built unusual stature in the White House.
“Pence has sort of a unique challenge because President Trump is such an idiosyncratic character,” says Goldstein. “Pence has been a lapdog in a way no other recent vice president has been — but he has also done more, such as being more assertive politically, than his predecessors.”
The elephant in the Republican room is that the emphasis here is not on the midterms but the 2020 or even 2024 presidential election.
Pence would likely run if the 45th president does not seek a second term.
But the question that must haunt Trump is this: If he seeks a second term, would Pence be his running mate?
Woodrow Wilson kept his vice president on his ticket for his second term, perhaps because Marshall lived up to his own definition of the job: “a man in a cataleptic fit; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it.”
And one other thing. Vice President Marshall behaved as if he were lost at sea.