When I interviewed Mike Pence recently, I asked him why so many people around him tell me the same thing: that the Marvel character he most resembles is the skinny, pre-super soldier Captain America who doesn’t hesitate to leap on what he thinks is a live grenade. Pence laughed, and talked as he often does of trying to serve higher aims in whatever positions God sees fit to put him. It was only after I stopped recording that Pence added that actually, that comparison had been one that stretched back to his tenure in the House — that his friends called him Captain America in a positive way, and his foes with a roll of the eye. He implied he didn’t want to say it when we were recording because it might sound boastful.
That’s Mike Pence for you right there — and it also explains why he’s running for president even though his chances of making it past the early states is as slim as that skinny CGI Chris Evans. He joins Tim Scott and Nikki Haley in the lane of people who seem to be yearning for a time that is past in Republican politics, and is unlikely to be restored again. But he’s also got the strongest social conservative credentials in the race, even more than Ron DeSantis, and intends to lean into those. For people tired of “pussy tapes” and multiple wives and insult comedy from the top of the ticket, Pence is your man.
Yet in today’s GOP, that seems to be a subsidiary thought. The Trump-DeSantis aggressive populist line is as wide as a Houston superfreeway, and the rest are running in a dirt dog-track on the side of the road. As narrow as the path to victory looks, if you’re a Hoosier vice president, a run like this is what you have to do.
Dan Quayle, Pence’s friend and sometimes counselor, did the same thing in 2000 — coming in an embarrassing eighth place in the Ames straw poll before dropping out. The national media framed and remembers Quayle as a gaffe-prone, dull-witted loser who didn’t know how to spell “potato.” That’s the total opposite of his position among Indiana conservatives, where Quayle toppled the powerful Senator Birch Bayh at the young age of thirty-three and made history racking up political wins and taking flak for telling hard truths about culture, the decline of fatherhood and the breakdown of the American family.
So it was Quayle Pence turned to on the eve of his fateful January 6 decision to defy Donald Trump, his now-disgraced attorney John Eastman and the rest of the miscreants who tried to find some way for the vice president to invent an entirely new legal theory of his role in affirming the results of the 2020 election. The retired vice president confirmed what the active one believed: that there was no path other than confirming the result, and that taking any other would result in utter chaos.
The thing to understand about Pence and his family is that faith is deeply, authentically part of his nature and decision-making. They pray and they mean it. So if prayer tells you that you ought to run for president, no matter the odds, well, you do it because you think that’s where God wants you — on the debate stage, making the case for your heartfelt beliefs on all the issues, regardless of the flak. You don’t question it, you just do it. You jump on that grenade.
