Hal Brown

 Why Pence the "least bad" plausible winner of the GOP primary to end up as the next president

By Hal Brown

Daniel Patrick Driscoll DSO, member of the Legion of Frontiersmen, wearing brown leather gauntlets. Vanity Fair caricature 15 February 1911, public domain

The first news and opinion website I look at in the morning is HUFFPOST just to see what they post as their lead story. This is what I saw today:

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These are the words I have no doubt he knew would make the headlines:

“President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Speaking about January 6th he said:

“Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”

He was right. Pence's address at the Gridiron Dinner is being covered on multiple news websites:

Even the expected jokes didn't spare the former boss he was frequently photographed gazing at him like he actually did see him as The Second Coming. For example"

He joked that Trump’s ego was so fragile, he wanted his vice president to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” — one of the lines is “did you ever know that you’re my hero?” — during their weekly lunches.

“I read that some of those classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago were actually stuck in the president’s Bible. Which proves he had absolutely no idea they were there.” From HUFFPOST

At present the only other Republican being considered by the pundits as having a snowball's chance in Hell of beating Trump in the primary is Ron DeSantis. He's described as Trump without the insanity and low IQ. (Read: 'Heartless aspiring autocrat': Legal expert warns Ron DeSantis is a 'danger to democracy')

The fact that DeSantis is not bordering on being a candidate who is also candidate for psychiatric care makes him far more dangerous to democracy than Trump. No matter, if either of them become president and by some merciful miracle the Democrats manage to win both the House and Senate the country will be on the slippery slo ape to being a full-blown fascist country. If the Democrats hold onto one house of Congress we'd be almost there and if they lose both throw both civil rights and human rights out the window. 

Nikki Haley, the only other officially declared candidate, is running on the "I love my Granddad Donald but he's just a tiny bit to old to be president" ticket.

Pence as of yesterday so far is the first Republican on list of possible GOP candidates who has thrown down the gauntlet in front of Trump. In effect he's taken off the gloves and slapped Trump in the face with one of them.

Pence has been criticized as being spineless... in fact he's being blasted right now on MSBC where they are saying that he should have spoken out forcefully right after January 6th. 

They are minimizing what he just said because it was at the Gridiron Dinner without going into the fact that this could have been the best best place to make the remarks for maximum media coverage.

I am cautiously optimistic that barring unforeseen medical problems Biden will win a second term because the Republicans will run either an extreme blatantly MAGA candidate, a MAGA in crinoline candidate, or a non-MAGA boring candidate like Pence. No matter who they run by the time of the election enough voters will take a look around at their lives and realize that the country hasn't turned into the hellscape the Republicans predicted it would be under President Biden.

They'd look at their own lives, at what are called kitchen table issues like gas and food prices, access to healthcare, to abortion including pills, and see that abstractions meant to horrify them like saying Biden was bringing communism to America are bogus. Furthermore, DeSantis and his anti-woke campaign, if he runs or someone else runs on their version of anti-woke, will be viewed as a meaningless scare tactic and an irrelevant crock of stupid shit, an abstraction that doesn't have an impact on their lives.

Pence is dull but basically a decent person. He doesn't want to be an autocrat. He's anything but narcissistic. As the most religious possible Republican candidate, he doesn't want to be seen as divine. He probably will pray for divine guidance in deciding whether to run or not. I don't see this as a particularly bad thing, in fact unless he actually hears the voice of God coming to him through a toaster, give his deeply held religious beliefs I'd suggest it is a good thing. 

I'd go as far as saying that if he sees the face of Jesus in a slice of toast and sees this as a sign it wouldn't upset me either. 

As things stand now Pence is the only Republican who stands a chance of becoming president who wouldn't totally scare the bejesus out of me (pun intended).