I expected you to say Margaret Thatcher, but I don’t know why.
Since Washington the single most important job of the president is to ensure the peaceful transition of power. Only one president has failed miserably to do that. No matter what else Pence would have done he would have bowed out gracefully if he lost. The fact that Trump fought against the transition and continues to is the worst thing that has happened politically to this country in my lifetime at the very least. Pence would have worked within the system. He would have signed some bills I didn’t like but that pendulum always swings. He wouldn’t have threatened (and continue to threaten) NATO and the balance of power in the world. He wouldn’t have tried to overthrow our own government. He would have called up Biden and conceded. He would have been at the inauguration. It’s not even close.
Pence wavered on certifying the Electoral College votes, and acted as an enabler for Donald Trump for the four years prior to that for all of the terrible and frankly un-Christian things that he did and said. If the people surrounding and supporting a hypothetical President Pence went to him and said, “We’ve prayed on it and God tells us that the election was stolen,” do you really think that he’d just step down and bow out? I don’t think that is nearly as cut and dried as you’d like to believe.
I’ve been hearing for four years now about what a hero Pence was for ‘standing up to Trump’, or how he should get an award for protecting democracy, or that he’s basically a normal politician stuck in a parade of nutballs and would-be fascists, and even that the Democrats should boost him in the primaries as a competitor to Trump (good luck with that); the reality is that he is a radical Fundamentalist Christian Nationalist who said a bunch of crazy shit during his stint as a radio personality, spent a campaign plus four years trying to minimize and gaslight the public as to the extent of Trump’s unsuitability for office, and took his sweet-ass time making even the most milquetoast of criticisms of Trump, all in the futile hope that it would succor favor with the Radical Right. This isn’t because he’s just a normal Republican with a belief in freedom and individual rights, and also getting some corporate payoff on the side; it is because he was looking for a way to advance his own theocratic agenda, and is bound more by his gormless and bland persona than any moderation of belief.
Stranger
Yes, Pence would have been a terrible President, but still better than Trump.
Pence almost surely would have been worse than even the Bush/Cheney team, but still better than Trump.
People keep saying this with little in the way of evidence to support it. Donald Trump is an awful human being and was a terrible executive who failed to soft-land a response to what was really a pretty mild pandemic, but he was so busy fêting himself that he couldn’t actually be bothered to bring most of his terrible ideas to fruition aside from a pointless trade war with China and pissing off various strategic allies, plus accommodating Mitch McConnell in ensconcing hyperconservative jurists on the Supreme Court and in the vacancies in federal courts that McConnell kept open by preventing appointments during the Obama Administration.
Pence, with broad support of the GOP and his Fundie Christian base, could have potentially brought many of his odious notions to action through both executive and legislative means. Just because he’s a bland, soft-spoken guy that doesn’t get in social media battles with celebrities or make crass misogynistic statements about what he can do to womens’ genitalia does not make him less of an actual threat or means that he has some innate respect for democratic traditions. Again, this was a guy who had to get his ethical guidance from Dan Quayle to do the very thing that the Constitution says he is obliged to do. I don’t see any reason to believe that he has some strong moral compass or wouldn’t immediately turn to autocracy if it meant advancing his Christian Nationalist beliefs.
Stranger
Enacting a bunch of horrible regressive policies is bad.
Corroding the democratic institutions of the US is much, much worse because it is so, so much harder to undo.
Agreed. Nobody here is defending Pence. Pence would have been a terrible president. But to bring back the old saying he would have been terrible within normal parameters. The damage he would have done to us culturally or legally would have been fixable within the Democratic process. We wouldn’t be sitting here worrying about the state of democracy in the entire country.
And yes we’re comparing a real presidency to a hypothetical presidency. That’s the point of the thread. It’s to compare a real presidency to a hypothetical one based on who the vice president was at the time. And I’ll just point out that Pence did have the opportunity to overthrow democracy in support of the man he had been brownnosing for 4 years. He did not do that. Did he waiver yeah he did. But he did the right thing in the end. Whatever else I think that needs to be recognized.
I just don’t agree with this. It was important for Washington because of his particular situation. I think a modern outgoing President could be completely indifferent to the peaceful transition of power, simply obeying the laws and customs without taking any extra actions, and still otherwise have been a great president. Possibly Lincoln was the most controversial incoming President who might have stirred up active opposition, and I don’t know if Buchanan took any actions to keep the lid on, but I’ve never heard about it if he did.
The only thing it took, pre-Trump, to peacefully transition was to not stir up the citizenry by telling lies about the election being stolen, and not encourage them to do something active about it. It wasn’t the outgoing or incoming President who forestalled controversy in 1960, it was Nixon, the loser, who gracefully conceded in spite of the mess in Illinois. That grace has changed now, probably for the foreseeable future, but I still don’t think it is a primary job of the President to do any more in that area than act like a decent human being.
As for Trump, disputing the election may have been the worst thing he did as President, but I think he only did it because it was the one thing that meant the most to him personally. If he had conceded and gone silently, he still would be the worst President ever. I’m glad we didn’t have Pence, he is an extreme ideologue about sex in general, and the government would have spent the entire four years of his term wrangling about that.
You need to go back and listen to Pence’s statements as the host of an eponymous conservative radio show host on WRCR-FM in Rushville, IN. He was affirmably and almost virulently anti-government even by conservative standards and made statements to the effect that the Bible was his constitution. That Pence wavered, even for a minute, on his legally-defined duty as President of the US Senate to deliver and certify the Electoral Colleges votes tells you everything about just how high he holds democratic norms compared to ‘loyalty’, and speaks to the kind of decision he would make when it came to adherence to Constitutional duties versus his fundamentalist interpretation of the Christian Bible. His later refusal to testify before Congress on the events of 6 January 2021, while perhaps done out of some sense of self-preservation, also speak to how pliable any moral foundation he has is.
Pence, in his own bland way, did just as much to erode democratic norms by not forcefully speaking out and acting in accordance with his duties, and his recent and reluctant refusal to back Trump is hardly any kind of counter to that. Suggesting that Pence is or would be “terrible within normal parameters” shows just how far normality has shifted, not what a basically incorruptible or selfless president Mike Pence would be in the face of an electoral loss. This is basically a replay of how much better Ben Carson would have been as President, with people asserting that he was a “nice man”, carried “how little baggage Carson carries”, and was “wrong within normal parameters” instead of doing the basic research to see that he was a corrupt toady with crazy notions about his Christian beliefs even by Seventh Day Adventist standards.
Stranger
You make some fantastic points. And I’m thinking on them right now. And I don’t have a direct response but I want to applaud you for your post. This was fantastic. And I say that as somebody who doesn’t inherently agree with it. I’ll see if I can find that radio show or a transcript of it at least. Very interested in seeing that.
I didn’t say it was hard. I didn’t say each president had to go out of their way to make the transition work. It’s still the most important responsibility a president has. And one president failed miserably to do that. Worst case scenario it leads to the complete destruction of the republic. Anything else Trump did pales in comparison. Anything Pence could have done pales in comparison.
I don’t disagree with any of your description of Pence, or the extent to which he would have been a terrible president. Or even that his actions on the 6th are in no way praiseworthy, and that he had a moral obligation to defend the constitutional principle that the loser leaves with a lot more conviction. However, in the counterfactual situation where he’s president and loses by the same margin as Trump, I believe he concedes in a more or less conventional fashion, likely calling for no end of recounts and investigations but not endlessly fabricating false allegations of election impropriety, and ultimately the events of the 6th never transpire in the first place. That would be much less corrosive than what did happen.
None of this should be taken as any sort of endorsement of Mike Pence. All I am saying is that Trump pushed way further into anti-democratic territory with his election denial than Pence would have, and that the negative consequences of that are more dangerous to the US than any round of reactionary conservative/theocratic policies would be. It’s Trump’s ability to not only deny reality, but to pull his base and by extension the entire Republican party into his alternate reality that Pence could never match, and because of that inability Pence would have been less dangerous to democracy than Trump actually was/is.
Yes, and Trump is the reason they have shifted so far that Pence seems normal. In my opinion, the worst thing that happened under Trump wasn’t simply the refusal to cede power, although that was a particularly salient example of the larger problem. The worst thing done by Trump was his total embrace of conspiracy theory and misinformation as mainstream politics. That is what led to a million COVID deaths a breakdown of the rule of law and distrust of Democracy. When 40% of the population doesn’t even exist in the same reality as the rest of us it really hard to return the country to functionality. This is what we mean when we say that Pence wold have been terrible within normal parameters.
I would also be curious as to what specific Christian nationalist adenda items would have been enacted by Pence that have not been enacted already. For years the holy grail of this movenment has been the over-turning of Roe v. Wade, and that is already done, as is taking an axe to separation of church and state. All of this has been done with Trump’s supreme court nominees, which I doubt would have been much different under Pence.
Beyond what has already been achieved I don’t see much room for improvement. Trump tried a Muslim ban which got shot down by the courts. There aren’t enough red states to repeal the 19th amendment, and so long as Women can vote and do so more frequently than men, you aren’t going to get Giliad. I suppose he could have tried to go after birth Control and pornography but even that would have been a tough fight to get through congress.
Pence being better, of course, but I think Kamala might have been more willing to play hardball than Biden, and also with no age issues.
Quayle wouldn’t have been better than Bush Sr., but he would have been far more entertaining.
You didn’t address this part of my quote (and I might have added “and vice versa”), and I still can’t see how your assertion is remotely true, and you haven’t really explained it. Foreign policy, economic policy, ambassadorship to the rest of the world, making important and long-lasting appointments, these are all places (and I’m sure there are others) where failure as a President can be disastrous. So can stirring up shit about losing re-election, I’m not saying that’s not important too. But making it all about what happens in the 10 weeks between election and inauguration does not make sense to me. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about that.
As far as making a case that Pence would have been better than Trump just for that reason, I don’t find it persuasive. Again, difference of opinion on what kinds of outcome are scarier, I guess.
“Foreign policy, economic policy, ambassadorship to the rest of the world, making important and long-lasting appointments, these are all places (and I’m sure there are others) where failure as a President can be disastrous.”
Sure and presidents have made disastrous decisions in those areas. They will make disastrous decisions in the future. What Trump did and is continuing to do is forment revolt which could lead to the end of the republic. There is a not an insignificant percentage of his followers who want just that. Turning the ship in the wrong direction or even running aground is no where near as bad as blowing up the whole thing. If a president makes disastrous decisions there is a chance to fix those problems in the future as long as there is a country to fix. Pence would have an agenda. He might have been able to get some of his agenda through. He would still have to work through the Congress and I don’t see that going and better than it did for Trump. Pence would get the same names Trump did for SCOTUS from the same source so that wouldn’t be much different.
Charisma is A competence of the Presidency, not the opposite of competence. 
Teddy Roosevelt had it right with the bully pulpit. Presidents have to be persuaders (among other things) to get things done, and charisma helps persuasion immensely.
FDR was a President with lots of charisma, who could go on the radio and soothe the Depression-worn citizenry’s nerves and ease it into accepting policies (week-long bank holiday after a slew of bank runs!, Lend-Lease during the “America First” era) and circumstances they may well not have accepted if presented by someone with less charisma.
Kennedy made inspiring speeches about the sacrifices of a Cold War, and the expense of resources for a moon-shot, not everyone was excited about even with his speeches, but a lot more people were excited by his speeches than without them.
Carter as President was an honest and earnest man with the charisma of a wet paper bag. I was too young to have a memory of his televised speeches, but my understanding is a lot of the audience felt lectured by him. His own willingness to throw on a sweater didn’t seem to persuade too many. The sacrifices of the energy crisis were measurably less than WWII – leaving aside there wasn’t an actual war, the Class A gasoline ration for WWII was much more of a sacrifice than anything proposed in the '70s – but people seemed a lot less willing to bear them for Carter than FDR.
But remember who his opponent was. I think in a Gore vs Dole Contest, charisma is pretty much a wash. Add to that the 90’s being basically a boom decade, pre-9/11 Communism defeated, economy’s great. I don’t see anything to prevent a 2nd Gore term, and without Lewinksi maybe an a Democrat in 2000.
Actually, I suppose one thing would be if Gore pushed too hard too fast, for example trying to get the US to go green 20 years early or making an exectuive order allowing open gays in the military. But hey in that case it might be worth it.
Even if Biden could have gotten more done than Obama without aggravating the racists, I still think that he was more valuable as a symbol that led to the empowerment of minorities that was what really ticked off the right. Yes, if he hadn’t been elected maybe we could have kept the culture wars at a slow simmer for another decade or so, but this was a war that needed to happen. In the same way that the election of Lincoln was better than would have been John Bell, despite the fact that an election of Bell could have prevented (or rather delayed) the Civil War.
But … did he like broccoli?
Agreed 100%. Even looking at it from a practical standpoint, Biden being able to push through more legislation than Obama due to lesser resistance, this cultural confrontation is something that has been coming for a long time.
Not to get too introspective, but I remember growing up in the '90s there was a general sense of we were at the “end of History” somehow. And I really thought that a lot of the long simmering racism and hatred that I’d read about in history books throughout the 20th century was mostly behind us. I mean of course there was skinheads, the klan, and other racist out there. That’s part of human nature I don’t think it’s something that can be completely be gotten rid of. I had no idea 30% of the country still thinks we should live in the Confederacy. Trump’s election has been a hell of a wake-up call.
Apologies if this is a hijack.