Mike Pence Becomes a Back-Stabbing Ned Flanders

Latest Newly Exposed RINO To Turn on Trump

“Stupid Flanders” - Homer Simpson

It’s a tired literary convention for right-leaning writers to ask, “Did you know this Hollywood celebrity (or character) is really a conservative?”  The animated TV comedy “The Simpsons” has generated more than its share of strained variations of this approach.  Example:  “Wow, did you hear Homer’s defense of Second Amendment rights last night?”  While I won’t argue the politics of Simpsons characters or sign off on all of the show’s humor (though it is regularly hilarious), I find I must at least invoke one well-known character to make an important point about the 2024 presidential campaign.

It is this:  Vice President Mike Pence’s unctuous if unintentional impression of Ned Flanders is beyond awful.  That’s because, unlike the good-natured Simpsons character he seemingly emulates, Pence is a scheming Machiavellian trying to do in the man who made his career, President Donald Trump.  Pence’s tactics to capture the Republican nomination for President are breathtaking, cynical and wrong. 

Ned Flanders, of course, is the ultra-square, stereotypical Christian character on “The Simpsons.”  He uses such phrases as “okily dokily” to capture his absurdly strait-laced behavior.  To be clear, I hold no brief for those who maliciously poke fun at people of faith (you can read my story here by way of Christian credentials). Yet Pence’s current double-dealing and treachery require exposure, and that surely won’t come from the Fake News Media, with whom he has recently curried favor.

Throughout his political career, and before he took on the recent establishment mission of demonizing Trump, Pence has profited from a reputation of being old-fashioned and morally above reproach.  This image was on display last weekend in his speech to the Gridiron Dinner. This is the annual gala of Fake News journalists and establishment politicians that Trump, in sharp contrast, repeatedly boycotted.

Courting the Fake News Media

Pence warmed up the crowd with the obligatory self-deprecating jokes that characterize the occasion.  He aw-shucked and traded on his reputation as a fuddy-duddy.  He also took a couple of comedic shots at Trump, such as:  “I once invited President Trump to Bible study.  He really liked the passages about the smiting and perishing of thine enemies.  As he put it, ‘Ya know, Mike, there’s some really good stuff in here.’”

But as the cliché in comedy goes, Pence was only getting started.  The budding presidential candidate pivoted to a takedown of Trump over the events of January 6, choosing as his venue the most anti-Republican audience possible save for the Democratic National Convention.  The location, of course, is both telling and meaningful.  Just as it was once considered very poor taste to criticize the United States from abroad (the country group The Dixie Chicks never recovered from the backlash that followed their public scolding of President George W. Bush from Europe), delivering a broadside against his former running mate in this leftist lion’s den spoke volumes about Pence’s character and intentions.

Pence chose to deliver his takedown of Trump at the Gridiron Dinner, the annual gala of Fake News journalists that’s the most anti-Republican audience possible save for the Democratic National Convention. 

Referring to the January 6 protests, Pence intoned before a suddenly hushed and temporarily supportive crowd, “Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace.  And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence added.  “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 that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Still, Pence hadn’t laid it on thick enough.  He next resorted to plain old brownnosing.  “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post,” Pence said.  “The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”

The speech had the intended effect.  Journalists who despise Pence’s party and professed agenda took a reprieve from their opposition to gush over his speech and disseminate its most useful parts to the nation.  Politico proclaimed Pence’s remarks “the sharpest condemnation yet from the once-loyal lieutenant” of Trump; the Washington Post parroted this by calling Pence’s speech his “strongest rebuke” to date of the former president.  Pence’s advisers privately admitted to Politico they hoped the Gridiron Dinner speech would “help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days:  Washington insiders and journalists.”

For many MAGA faithful, who voted for Pence twice as part of their effort to secure two presidential terms for Trump, Pence’s emergence as an openly RINO candidate for president is undoubtedly stunning.  But that’s because, in fairness, Trump mistakenly vouched for this conventional establishment Republican in 2016, only to learn in time that Pence’s true loyalties run to the RINO pack whence he came.

Everything about Pence’s career cries out “establishment Republican politician.”  Pence started as a standard-issue GOP Congressman of the type we know well.  He mouthed the right things about “limited government” and the like to win the votes of Republican primary voters, then refused to fully fight the militant Left or risk anything of personal consequence to achieve the goals he espoused.  This controversy-averse posture hardened during his time as Governor of Indiana.  In 2015, Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provided legal protections for Christian business owners sued by gay activists.  Boycotts soon hit the state, and Pence promptly backed down and amended the law.  Christian conservatives argued his changes “destroyed” the law, but to no avail, as they were sold out again by yet another RINO politician.  Despite all this, Trump plucked Pence from relative obscurity and carried him along to Washington in 2016.

Now, Pence plainly hopes his “okily dokily” act will work once more as he prepares to run for President.  His strategy is discernible.  He will focus on deceiving and exploiting fellow evangelicals, particularly in Iowa, even as he simultaneously lays down markers to become the “moderate” alternative to Trump and DeSantis.  By combining the two disparate camps, he creates a path to the nomination.

The McCain Strategy Redux

The first steps in this facile strategy have been taken.  To help nail down his appeals to Christians, Pence’s political advocacy group just launched a round of ads in Iowa supporting parental rights and opposing transgender-affirming policies in schools.  The pro-Pence group Advancing American Freedom announced this “grassroots campaign” plainly as an effort to prep the political battlefield in Iowa by burnishing his Christian bona fides.  The Gridiron Dinner, in turn, was his undisguised overture to moderates and their Fake News overlords.

Pence is blatantly running a John McCain-inspired campaign for president, similarly cultivating the Fake News Media and insiders—by his advisers’ own admission. 

Pence knows the Iowa Caucuses have a history of embracing and catapulting Christian candidates from a crowded GOP field.  This pattern began in 1988 with the success of Pat Robertson, a famous pastor and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who finished a surprising second by beating out Vice President George H.W. Bush.  Champions of social conservatism have run strong there ever since.  Pat Buchanan finished a close second to U.S. Senator Bob Dole in 1996; Governor George W. Bush won by double digits after openly campaigning as an evangelical in 2000; little-known Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee won the caucuses in 2008 over U.S. Senator John McCain and Governor Mitt Romney; and U.S. Senator Rick Santorum defeated the establishment-crowned Romney there again four years later.  One of Trump’s few losses in the 2016 primary elections was in Iowa, where he was eclipsed by Christian-backed U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.

There is currently a drought of polling of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers.  One poll taken this month by Victory Insights shows Trump with a huge lead, but with Pence in second place before even declaring his candidacy (Trump 61 %, Pence 8 %).  Trump’s numbers will soften as the Fake News Media joins forces with the Koch network and other ruling-class entities primed to carpet-bomb the Hawkeye State with paid ads.

Pence’s strategy is creative and might just work, at least for a while.  He plainly hopes to straddle the Christian-moderate divide in the Republican Party by appealing to “decent” Iowans (Pence uses this term often and strategically), and earning their “slot” in the caucuses there, while picking up the roughly one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents nationally who identify as moderate or liberal.  Pence would be aided tremendously by having a Trump-DeSantis slugfest that allows him to stay out of the line of fire.

In 2008 U.S. Senator John McCain, now recognized belatedly as an uber-RINO (those of us who tangled with him in Arizona learned that long ago), carved out a similarly tortuous path to the nomination.  After losing badly in Iowa, McCain took the moderate/independent mantle (remember the phony “Straight Talk Express”) and benefited from having U.S. Senator Fred Thompson stay in the race through Super Tuesday.  Thompson siphoned off enough votes from fellow Southerner Huckabee so McCain could accumulate troves of delegates from “winner-take-all” states sufficient to bag the nomination.  A comparable dynamic might work for Pence.  He would need to cobble together enough bamboozled Christians and moderates to form a stable coalition through the primaries.

The political dexterity shown by Trump’s vice president has been wretched yet remarkable.  Pence is blatantly running a McCain-like campaign for president, similarly cultivating the Fake News Media and insiders—as his own advisers admit.  Pence’s “inner circle” has gone so far as to say they see “the 2008 campaign of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as a template” for their own effort.

Will it work?  Only if Republican voters have learned absolutely nothing from decades of RINO deceit.  Most likely, GOP voters will wise up to this latest establishment con job in time, as they did in 2016, and reject Pence’s overtures.  Until then, we can look forward to a year or more of a duplicitous and insufferable Ned Flanders act that will leave us needing a jocular dose of the real character in order to recover.