What really caused Mike Pence to swear off negative campaigning
Before he ran his campaigns as a sunny-side-up conservative driven by a deep Christian faith, Mike Pence sounded a lot like Donald Trump.
Way back in 1990, Pence ran a House race in which he broke Indiana politics’ rules of decorum, leveled insults and personal attacks, and cut a racially charged television commercial aiming to tie his opponents to Middle Eastern petro-states.
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Pence went after his opponent, incumbent House Democrat Phil Sharp, with an ad depicting a man dressed in Arab head gear, wearing sunglasses and appearing before a fake desert backdrop. Tapping into the angst over the lead up to the first Persian Gulf War, the actor sarcastically praised Sharp, then a top Democratic subcommittee chairman on energy issues, for being Arab oil producers’ “best friend” and not weaning the United States off foreign oil.
It didn’t go over well. The Washington-based Arab American Institute labeled the commercial offensive and asked for it to be pulled. And the Indianapolis News said the actor had used “perhaps the worst Omar Sharif impersonation ever recorded” and called it “insulting and derogatory…appealing to racist sentiments.”
At the end of a race that the Greensburg Daily News editorial board declared “one of the worst negative campaigns Indiana has ever witnessed,” Pence lost to Sharp by 19 percentage points.
After the defeat, Pence entered a rapid metamorphosis, penning an essay titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner” in which he apologized for his behavior and forever swore off negative campaigning.
For a quarter century, he kept that pledge, successfully winning a House seat in 2000 and the Indiana governor’s race in 2012 by pushing his own conservative vision and steering away from the hardball tactics that both he and Sharp had employed in 1990.
Now, however, Pence’s time on the ticket with Trump is straining that pledge. He has not gone negative in a Trumpian way — he has studiously avoided publicly adopting Trump’s preferred moniker for Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” — but he’s not all sunshine and rainbows either. Pence has attacked Bill Clinton’s “character,” called Hillary Clinton “the most dishonest candidate for President of the United States since Richard Nixon,” and said Vladimir Putin is a stronger leader than President Barack Obama.
That no-negative pledge will be again tested before a nationally-televised audience on Tuesday when Pence debates his vice presidential rival, Sen. Tim Kaine. And how far the Republican will be willing to go into negative campaigning will depend in large part on why he gave it up to begin with — a decision whose motivations have never been entirely clear.
Pence credits his personal turnaround to a phone call with a journalist whose insights into that 1990 campaign clearly struck a chord. Pence had just taken the job as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank, when a mildly incredulous reporter called to ask him about the new role. “I never really thought of you as a conservative,” the reporter told Pence.
Pence later told the Indianapolis Star that the comment “pierced my heart.”
Pence now describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican —in that order.” And at the time, he said, the reporter’s reaction stung because it demonstrated how little of his policy position had come through during his run. He was, he said, a candidate concerned about lowering taxes, higher defense spending and a staunch defense of socially conservative values, but all of that was overshadowed in a race where he and Sharp traded jabs about each other’s ethics.
(Nearly three decades later, the faux-Arab oil ad has become something of a legend, in part because no one has been able to publicly uncover complete footage of the 30-second spot. Several of the key players from that 1990 campaign said they couldn’t find a copy. POLITICO also visited Sharp’s congressional library records at Ball State University in Muncie, but the commercial wasn’t in his collection. Since Trump picked Pence, several long-time Indiana Democratic operatives have also been trying to find the ad but so far have come up empty handed.)
Pence vowed his negative approach wouldn’t be repeated. Running for office “ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate. … a campaign ought to be about the advancement of issues whose success or failure is more significant than that of the candidate,” he wrote in his apology, which was published in theIndiana Policy Review.
Pence’s associates say they saw the lingering sting, and they saw Pence grapple with the consequences.
“He feared he lost some respect and he didn’t want to be in that position again,” said Curt Smith, a long-time Pence ally and one of Indiana’s most prominent social conservatives as president of the Indiana Family Institute. “You start calling people and they don’t call you back, not because you lost but because they don’t think you’re a good guy.”
But even as Pence lamented the moral failings of negative campaigning, Pence conceded there was another reason for why he was done with it: It didn’t work.
“I got beat like a barn mule,” Pence said in 1995.
And long-time Pence associates say the results of negative campaigning left Pence with few other options. “People didn’t gravitate to him when he campaigned that way… He didn’t feel good about it,” said Jim Merritt, an Indiana Republican state senator who has known Pence since the late 1970s. “He lost, so he had to change.”
And change he did. After building a career in talk radio, Pence returned to campaigning in 2000 as the optimist candidate, including with an ad that couldn’t have been farther from his 1990 bomb. The spot featured genteel images of farmers and a barn, as well as Pence behind the microphone delivering one of his syndicated radio show’s signature radio openings: “Greetings across the amber waves of grain, this is Mike Pence.”
But while Pence shifted, so did the political landscape around him, making Pence’s path to power far smoother. By 2000, rather than running to unseat an incumbent Democrat in Indiana’s 2nd district, he was aiming to succeed a retiring Republican in a district that had shifted decidedly to the right.
He won the race by more than 12 points, with 50 percent of the vote, in a four-way race. By 2002, redistricting made the district slightly more rural and even less competitive for Democrats. Pence, sticking to his positive campaigning pledge, never received less than 60 percent of the vote as he was re-elected every year from 2002 to 2010.
The first time his pledge was truly put to the test came in 2012, as he made the jump from Congress to state politics. Running for governor, Pence defeated his Democratic foe John Gregg by just 3 points, even as Mitt Romney beat President Barack Obama in the state by almost 11 points. He ran only positive advertisements in that race and, in response to Gregg’s attacks on the debate stage, quietly — and effectively — shot back: “John, you’re not sounding very much like yourself these days. I’ve known you for a long time.”
Rex Elsass, Pence’s longtime media consultant who recently signed on to assist the Trump presidential campaign, told POLITICO Pence had in the past rejected his suggestions of attacking opponents, but “it was clear it was not a consideration.”
“It’s hard to respond or draw a contrast without using the name of your opponent,” Elsass said. “He succeeded without that.”
What remains to be seen is whether Pence can stay squeaky clean in a race where he’s running from behind. Indeed, in campaigns, front-runners are rarely the first to go negative, hoping to ignore their opponents (save for perhaps criticizing their opponents for dirty politics) while talking about their agenda.
On the national stage in 2016, Pence doesn’t have that luxury. Polling indicates Trump is close to Clinton, but still running slightly behind. And even in the Republican primary, when Trump was leading nearly the whole time, he never hesitated to punch down at “little” Marco Rubio, “low-energy” Jeb Bush or “Lyin’” Ted Cruz.
And if Pence does break his vow on Tuesday or after, Sharp said it would bring his former Republican rival full circle.
Looking back on the infamous faux-Arab commercial, Sharp sees a connection to what came of Pence’s political career — including his union with Trump.
“The particular ads that he ran, were harsher than perhaps were generally seen,” Sharp told POLITICO. “I think they fell flat. They had the tendency, to be frank about it, to have that Trump tendency to be so over the top they weren’t believable.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/mike-pence-negative-campaigning-229030#ixzz4M3D9eDH6
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