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‘Read Econmic News Together’ Series
OPTIMISTIC Republicans will take comfort in the naming of Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and a strait-laced social and fiscal conservative, as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running-mate. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and a long-time colleague of Mr Pence’s in Congress, sounded frankly relieved as he welcomed the news—which,true to Mr Trump’s career as a star of reality TV, was unveiled on Twitter after days of fevered speculation, leaks and semi-secret job interviews involving finalists being whizzed around the Midwest in private jets. The announcement itself had been set for Friday morning in Trump Tower, in Manhattan, but was postponed after the terrorist massacre in Nice.
Working hard to detect a win for his school of thrifty yet compassionate conservativism, Mr Ryan chose to home in on Mr Pence’s record as a Midwestern tax-cutting governor, and as a supporter of education reforms aimed at improving public education in even the poorest neighbourhoods. “Mike Pence comes from the heart of the conservative movementand the heart of America,” the Speaker declared. “We need someone who is steady and secure in his principles, someone who can cut through the noise and make acompelling case for conservatism. Mike Pence is that man.”
Less sunny Republicans will suspect that Mr Ryan is clutching at straws. The most pessimistic, who believe that Mr Trump is an unprincipled demagogue staging a hostile takeover of their party, may compare Mr Pence to a puppet CEO kept on as a figure head by the corporateraiders who now control his business—only to discover that nobody reports to him and his diary contains nothing but golf.
Vice-presidential picks are sometimes talked up as vital additions to the top ticket, with the power to put their home states in the victory column or to provide vital regional, racial or political balance for the presidential nominee. Most political scientists argue that their positive contribution is distinctly limited. Mr Ryan knows this from personal experience. As Mitt Romney’s running-mate in 2012 he did not help Republicans win his home state of Wisconsin, and has since admitted that he chafed at being barred by Team Romney from giving broaden-the-base speeches in black inner-cities and immigrant neighbourhoods, as he had wanted.
At the margins, a Veep-pick can be an effective attack dog, tearing into the other party’s presidential nominee while the boss stays, statesman-like, above the fray. There is evidence that a terrible running-mate can weigh down a ticket—much of it provided by the dramatically ill-informed former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, during her run at the side of Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee in 2008.
One thing can be said with some confidence about Mr Pence’s naming. Mr Trump has apparently concluded that the Republican establishment—if that name can still be applied to leaders in Congress, powerful conservative donors and some of the grander conservative pund its and talking-heads—may be of some use to him between now and the general election in November. Picking Mr Pence does not amount to a Trump apology to such grandees, and does not change the queasiness that many veterans feel as they head to Cleveland for the Republican National Convention from July 18th-21st (not to mention the scores of big-name Republicans simply giving Cleveland a miss). Instead, Mr Trump is giving Republican bigwigs an excuse to embrace him, and to pretend that he is a standard-bearer for the principles that they claim to hold dear.
Mr Pence is a man to make a Republican convention conventional. A firebrand as a young member of Congress, voting against George W Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” education bill in 2001 and generally opposing all attempts to extend the federal government’s reach, his positions have become orthodoxy as his party shifted to the right. He has called himself: “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.”
Mr Pence is against any amnesty for the 11m or so immigrants in America without legal status, a position which puts him to the right of then-president Bush, but is less harsh than Mr Trump’s call to form a federal deportation force with orders to round the 11m up and throw them out (before letting the “good ones” back in). As governor of Indiana Mr Pence sought to ban Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state, aligning himself with such conservative Republicans as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, whose presidential campaign he endorsed until Mr Cruz dropped out, a week after losing the Indiana primary. But Mr Pence criticised one of Mr Trump’s signature policies, his proposal to bar entry to Muslims, or at least Muslims from terror-struck nations. In a tweet from December 2015 that has been much-circulated in the past 24 hours, Mr Pence said: “Calls to ban Muslims from entering the US are offensive and unconstitutional.”
The new vice-presidential pick is a hardliner on guns, favouring a nationwide right to carry a gun in public. In March he approved a law in Indiana which would outlaw any abortions on grounds of a foetus’s race or ancestry, but also—controversially—abortions based on adiagnosis of Down’s Syndrome or other handicap. That law has since been stayed by a federal judge following a legal challenge. As a member of Congress he supported free-trade pacts that Mr Trump has denounced.
Some Christian conservatives regard Mr Pence as a sell-out, however, after he back-tracked on his support for a “religious-freedom” law which both proponents and critics said was designed to offer protections to businesses, such as florists or cake-bakers, that wanted to refuse service to couples planning a gay wedding. After signing the law in early 2015 Mr Penc ewas faced with an outcry from big businesses, and agreed to a legislative fix that made clear the state would not allow discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Still, Christian conservatives could have had more to grumble about. They have still less love for two other finalists for vice-president, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey (seen by hardliners as weak on abortion and gay rights) and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker ofthe House of Representatives, who like Mr Trump is thrice-married.
Mr Gingrich’s own career in Washington,built on demagoguery, back-stabbing and egomania, foreshadowed the Republican Party’s current agonies and Mr Trump’s rise. In a desperate attempt to securethe vice-presidential nod, Mr Gingrich went down fighting on Thursday night ,telling the Fox News channel after the Nice terror attacks that America should test every person in the country from a “Muslim background” and “if they believe in Sharia they should be deported.” Leaving aside the several sections of the constitution that stand in the way of that plan, cynics noted that MrGingrich was in danger of overshadowing Mr Trump’s Muslim entry ban—and that the presumptive Republican nominee is not a man who likes to be trumped. Hence Mr Pence.
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