The Slatest

Mike Pence Wrote a Manifesto Against Trump-Style Campaigning in 1991

Mike Pence (R-IN) answers reporters questions during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol December 2, 2010 in Washington, DC.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In 1990, Mike Pence ran for Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District seat against Democratic Rep. Phil Sharp. He lost after what is considered by some to be the ugliest campaign in the state’s history. Writer Craig Fehrman wrote about the race in a 2013 profile of Pence:

One Pence ad featured a man in a tacky robe with a thick Arab accent thanking Sharp for his support of foreign oil. Some still maintain that the ad starred Pence himself, and its lost footage has become a sort of Ark of the Covenant in Indiana politics. But the obsession with this ad obscures a larger point: Pence didn’t just run an ugly campaign; he ran an inept one.

Part of the ineptitude Fehrman references was Pence’s use of campaign funds for personal expenses. For eight months between January and August 1990, some of his living expenses, including credit card bills and “golf fees” were covered by campaign contributions. Pence defended his actions, which were both legal at the time and properly disclosed, by slamming the exorbitantly high cost of campaigning. But the revelation, seized upon by the Sharp campaign, doomed him. Ferhman writes that the campaign’s tone bottomed out when during a press conference, “one of Sharp’s staffers brandished Pence’s campaign-finance reports and said, “If you’re giving money to Mike Pence, you’re paying his mortgage.”

After losing the race, Pence wrote a column in the Indiana Policy Review and unearthed by Fehrman called, “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” in which he expressed regret at his role in setting the tone the campaign had taken and offered his thoughts on ethical campaigning more broadly. With Pence now rumored to be Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, his sentiments read strangely today.

“Negative campaigning is wrong,” he wrote, because, while potentially effective, it takes up space in political discourse that could be devoted to discussion of the issues:

[T]his wrongness is not limited to the personal but extends to the general. Yes, it was personally wrong for me to waste my moment and limited campaign dollars talking about how an opponent might or might not have financed a rural retreat. But in my party’s defeat, as unaddressed issue piled upon unaddressed issue, it seems more grievous that the faithful were left with so few clues as to how I would have governed differently.

He goes on to list three principles for campaigning in good conscience—principles that Donald Trump has stomped on every single day of the past year, if not the entirety of his adult life:

First, a campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate. That means your First Amendment rights end at the tip of your opponent’s nose—even in the matter of political rhetoric.

Mike Pence, the presumptive vice presidential nominee of a man who suggested that an opponent’s father was a co-conspirator in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, wrote that the ideal candidate chooses decency and refrains from personal attacks.

Second, a campaign ought to be about the advancement of issues whose success or failure is more significant than that of the candidate. Whether on the left or the right, candidates ought to leave a legacy—a foundation of arguments—in favor of policies upon which their successors can build. William Buckley carries with him a purposeful malapropism. “Don’t just do something,” it says, “stand there.”

Mike Pence, the presumptive vice presidential nominee of a man who defended, unconvincingly, the size of his penis on a presidential debate stage in front of a television audience of millions, wrote that the legacy of the ideal candidate is a foundation of policy arguments.

Third and very much last, campaigns should be about winning. A fellow member of the Failed Politician’s Club told me recently, “Our only mistake was that we thought that winning was the most important thing we could do.” He considers it more than a literal correction that Vince Lombardi’s exact words were, “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” (The “winning is everything” line was spoken by the ignoble and now forgotten Red Sanders.)

Mike Pence, the presumptive vice presidential nominee of Donald Trump, wrote, 25 years ago, that “winning” isn’t everything.

It’s possible that Pence really did, and really still does, believe all that he wrote all those years ago. It’s also possible that he was, and still is, full of it. If he is indeed Trump’s VP pick, we will find out soon enough.