It was a real squeaker, but former Vice President Mike Pence's campaign now says they've met the minimum donor requirements for Pence to participate in the first Republican presidential primary debate. The Republican National Committee tried to winnow the the field down to non-gadfly candidates with a rule stipulating candidates could only participate if they had at least 40,000 unique donors, along with a few other requirements, but the last Republican vice president to serve was sweating bullets trying to break out of that gadfly status.
The problem for Pence remains the same: The seditionist Republican who goaded an already violent mob into hunting for Pence in the halls of the Capitol is still the preferred candidate of most of the Republican Party. The vice president who refused to back a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government is supported by barely 40,000 Republicans in the whole damn country, because Republicans like sedition and don't like people who won't go along with it.
And for all of the pundits who think that's a harsh assessment of the party: Look at the damn polls.
The next problem for Pence is now that he's finally qualified for the first Republican debate, he has to decide whether to show up. He is very nearly persona non grata in the party and will face Republican debate crowds that consider him to be an enemy on par with Hillary Clinton.
Pence used to have a natural base in his party. He was Republican Jesus, the hard-right anti-abortion, pro-discrimination godbotherer backed by evangelicals pushing for the United States to become a conservative theocracy. But then it turned out that what evangelical theocrats really wanted in a president was an ever-crooked, always preening manslut, and all of the religious stuff was in fact a very distant second. Pence and a hell of a lot of other professional Jesus-punchers suddenly found themselves without an audience.
The problem for Pence is that he's tried to mount an entire damn campaign without addressing or acknowledging the event that, for most national voters, is the only reason they know his name at all. Donald Trump tried to have him killed—or was, at the least, indifferent to whether the mob killed him or didn't—during a violent coup attempt. Pence still seems to believe that if he merely shows up on the debate stage and says theocratic things, the churchgoers whose religious leaders laid hands on Trump in the Oval Office and declared that their bank-defrauding, tax-dodging, racist rapist was a holy man will suddenly remember that oh, who they really wanted in the White House was a bowl of vanilla pudding with mommy issues.
Pence is betting his whole campaign on that. His scramble to find even 40,000 Republicans in the whole country willing to throw a few bucks his way to make his case is evidence enough of how it's going.
Once on the debate stage, Pence will have to make a final choice. He'll either have to condemn Trump for mounting a plainly illegal attempted coup, or he'll have to weasel around it yet again with vague responses that suggest "mistakes were made," or, "Donald and I simply disagreed on whether I should be strung up by an angry mob after I refused to participate in a scheme to topple the government, but that is all in the past and not worth discussing now."
Campaign Action
Pence's campaign clearly intends him to take the gutless route. In their story, The Washington Post quotes Pence's communications adviser's statement claiming Pence is "looking forward to a substantive debate about the issues important to the American people." That's been the language used by almost every elected Republican in the party to dodge reporters who ask about the coup attempt or their role in it.
That is not going to play well on a debate stage. Or rather, it will only play well if Pence is so sycophantic towards Trump and the coup that he wins the approval of the listening audience of ticket-privileged Republican coup supporters, at which point Pence's campaign will be good and dead because he'll have lost every possible constituency all at once. Evangelical Republicans aren't going to come back to him, not when they have Trump and Ron DeSantis promising to smite their enemies and forge a new Christian nationalist nation. Coup-hesitant Republicans, all 40,000 of them, will see Pence as a buffoon more focused on not getting booed off the stage than defending his own past principles.
And that will be the last we see of Pence before he goes off to some sinecure inside a Christian nationalist think tank. The rest of his career will consist of writing opinion columns once in a blue moon, petty little things that grouse at America for not doing the things Pence wants it to do, which are quickly forgotten.
It's possible that Pence's naturally flabby coup responses will not pass muster with the Republican debate moderators. It is possible that they will press, not because anyone involved with a Fox News-hosted Republican debate truly wants to hear about the time Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government, but because primary debates are almost brain-rottingly boring things and it's the moderators' job to get someone to throw a punch decent enough for post-debate punditry to replay, analyze, and coo over. If Pence truly wanted to throw a wrench in the gears, he could demure with the statement that he cannot talk about such things because he is, after all, a possible witness in at least one criminal trial involving his old White House's plot to pass fraudulent election results off as real ones.
Wouldn't that be a sight to behold. But we can't count on it, or even hope for it. On the campaign trail, Pence has shown himself to be unambitious in the extreme when it comes to twisting the knife into the seditionist once-boss he is theoretically supposed to be campaigning against. It's difficult to understand why Pence is even running. This is a hell of a lot to go through for a vanity run, especially if you're not going to use it to convince the Republican voting base that no, really, it was super-wrong to send a mob into the Capitol to have Pence killed and they should probably not support that plan in the future. But apparently that's not "important to the American people," so instead he'll talk about theocracy and tax cuts and why it's okay to be racist against immigrants.
Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.
Embedded Content
RELATED STORIES:
Fox News all but joins the Trump defense team
Trump's Republican competitors respond to his latest indictment. It's sad
The only thing funnier than the RNC loyalty pledge is candidate reactions to it
The problem for Pence remains the same: The seditionist Republican who goaded an already violent mob into hunting for Pence in the halls of the Capitol is still the preferred candidate of most of the Republican Party. The vice president who refused to back a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government is supported by barely 40,000 Republicans in the whole damn country, because Republicans like sedition and don't like people who won't go along with it.
And for all of the pundits who think that's a harsh assessment of the party: Look at the damn polls.
The next problem for Pence is now that he's finally qualified for the first Republican debate, he has to decide whether to show up. He is very nearly persona non grata in the party and will face Republican debate crowds that consider him to be an enemy on par with Hillary Clinton.
Pence used to have a natural base in his party. He was Republican Jesus, the hard-right anti-abortion, pro-discrimination godbotherer backed by evangelicals pushing for the United States to become a conservative theocracy. But then it turned out that what evangelical theocrats really wanted in a president was an ever-crooked, always preening manslut, and all of the religious stuff was in fact a very distant second. Pence and a hell of a lot of other professional Jesus-punchers suddenly found themselves without an audience.
The problem for Pence is that he's tried to mount an entire damn campaign without addressing or acknowledging the event that, for most national voters, is the only reason they know his name at all. Donald Trump tried to have him killed—or was, at the least, indifferent to whether the mob killed him or didn't—during a violent coup attempt. Pence still seems to believe that if he merely shows up on the debate stage and says theocratic things, the churchgoers whose religious leaders laid hands on Trump in the Oval Office and declared that their bank-defrauding, tax-dodging, racist rapist was a holy man will suddenly remember that oh, who they really wanted in the White House was a bowl of vanilla pudding with mommy issues.
Pence is betting his whole campaign on that. His scramble to find even 40,000 Republicans in the whole country willing to throw a few bucks his way to make his case is evidence enough of how it's going.
Once on the debate stage, Pence will have to make a final choice. He'll either have to condemn Trump for mounting a plainly illegal attempted coup, or he'll have to weasel around it yet again with vague responses that suggest "mistakes were made," or, "Donald and I simply disagreed on whether I should be strung up by an angry mob after I refused to participate in a scheme to topple the government, but that is all in the past and not worth discussing now."
Campaign Action
Pence's campaign clearly intends him to take the gutless route. In their story, The Washington Post quotes Pence's communications adviser's statement claiming Pence is "looking forward to a substantive debate about the issues important to the American people." That's been the language used by almost every elected Republican in the party to dodge reporters who ask about the coup attempt or their role in it.
That is not going to play well on a debate stage. Or rather, it will only play well if Pence is so sycophantic towards Trump and the coup that he wins the approval of the listening audience of ticket-privileged Republican coup supporters, at which point Pence's campaign will be good and dead because he'll have lost every possible constituency all at once. Evangelical Republicans aren't going to come back to him, not when they have Trump and Ron DeSantis promising to smite their enemies and forge a new Christian nationalist nation. Coup-hesitant Republicans, all 40,000 of them, will see Pence as a buffoon more focused on not getting booed off the stage than defending his own past principles.
And that will be the last we see of Pence before he goes off to some sinecure inside a Christian nationalist think tank. The rest of his career will consist of writing opinion columns once in a blue moon, petty little things that grouse at America for not doing the things Pence wants it to do, which are quickly forgotten.
It's possible that Pence's naturally flabby coup responses will not pass muster with the Republican debate moderators. It is possible that they will press, not because anyone involved with a Fox News-hosted Republican debate truly wants to hear about the time Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government, but because primary debates are almost brain-rottingly boring things and it's the moderators' job to get someone to throw a punch decent enough for post-debate punditry to replay, analyze, and coo over. If Pence truly wanted to throw a wrench in the gears, he could demure with the statement that he cannot talk about such things because he is, after all, a possible witness in at least one criminal trial involving his old White House's plot to pass fraudulent election results off as real ones.
Wouldn't that be a sight to behold. But we can't count on it, or even hope for it. On the campaign trail, Pence has shown himself to be unambitious in the extreme when it comes to twisting the knife into the seditionist once-boss he is theoretically supposed to be campaigning against. It's difficult to understand why Pence is even running. This is a hell of a lot to go through for a vanity run, especially if you're not going to use it to convince the Republican voting base that no, really, it was super-wrong to send a mob into the Capitol to have Pence killed and they should probably not support that plan in the future. But apparently that's not "important to the American people," so instead he'll talk about theocracy and tax cuts and why it's okay to be racist against immigrants.
Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.
Embedded Content
RELATED STORIES:
Fox News all but joins the Trump defense team
Trump's Republican competitors respond to his latest indictment. It's sad
The only thing funnier than the RNC loyalty pledge is candidate reactions to it