Tag Archives: Pence

Selling Cars and Candidates

When I was in college, I worked one summer for a friend of my father; he owned a Cadillac-Rambler agency (no kidding!), and I was billed as the first female used-car salesman (not “salesperson” back then) in Anderson, Indiana. I soon learned that if I wanted to sell a car, I needed to find out what the buyer wanted and emphasize those features–if someone came in wanting a red car, I talked about what a great shade of red this one had; if they wanted a V-8 engine, I talked about that.

A pretty elementary lesson in marketing.

Unfortunately, that’s the one lesson political candidates at all levels have really learned well.

We like to think of the democratic system as one where candidates and parties offer us competing visions and philosophies, and we choose between them. But all too often, that isn’t what happens. Instead, candidates hide or minimize agendas that they think (usually correctly) voters won’t “buy.” They become stealth candidates of a sort. So we have a Richard Mourdock, a man who won his primary promising to be intransigent, suddenly talking about co-operation and bipartisanship. You have Mike Pence, who has spent his entire time in Congress fighting for far-right culture issues, suddenly voicing concern about  jobs and economic development, and another culture-warrior, Scott Schneider, running ads touting his bona fides as a “family man, and small businessman” who serves the public in the Indiana legislature.

It’s enough to make me sympathize with the folks on the far right who are always complaining that their Republican candidates won’t run a full-throated conservative campaign. That complaint assumes that a campaign run forthrightly on Right issues–defunding Planned Parenthood, passing a “personhood” amendment to outlaw not just abortion but also most birth control, anti-GLBT measures and of course starving government until it’s small enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s bathtub–would be a winner.

Candidates who aren’t entirely delusional recognize that these positions do not reflect the will of the larger electorate, no matter how fervently they are embraced by the True Believers. So they lie. They try to re-invent themselves. They tell us what they think we want to hear. And if they have enough money and good advertising consultants, they often win.

Because selling that car is more important than admitting that it’s maroon, not red. Being elected–achieving some measure of power–trumps running a campaign based upon telling voters the truth.

It’s interesting that so many of these profoundly dishonest campaigns are run by candidates who talk incessantly about the importance of religion, and who want us to know how godly and pious they are. I guess they missed that part about “bearing false witness.”

They’d make great car salesmen.

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The Big Con

My husband and I were discussing the Council’s current standoff with the Ballard Administration–a dispute triggered by Ballard’s refusal to share budget information with the Council and other elected officials. That conversation brought back memories from our days in the Hudnut Administration; the then-Controller, Fred Armstrong, made himself available to Councilors, Department heads, the media….pretty much anyone who was interested in the intricacies of the budget. Fred would go on and on, explaining the numbers, funds, sources…

I don’t think anyone understood a word he said. I know I didn’t. It was the classic “bury them in bullshit,” and he was great at it. (He was also an incredibly competent public servant.)

Fred knew that most people don’t understand public finance. Our widespread fiscal ignorance is why Paul Ryan has been taken seriously, despite a budget that David Stockman, among others, has described as a “fantasy” and “devoid of credible math.” (Stockman, for those of you too young to remember, was Ronald Reagan’s very conservative Budget Director.)

Today’s candidates are counting on our ignorance of the most basic axioms of taxation and government revenue. It isn’t just that–as a colleague of mine put it recently–half of them clearly don’t know the difference between a marginal and effective tax rate. It’s that they engage in wishful, magical thinking.

Yesterday, I saw an ad for Mike Pence in which he promised to cut taxes “across the board,” and to establish an office of regulatory affairs that would resist federal regulations and return federal dollars.

I can’t decide if Pence is really that stupid, or he just thinks voters are.

There are legitimate issues around regulation–what is enough, what is too much. Reasonable people can differ over their assessments of particular rules. There is a pretty broad consensus that banking regulations were too lax, and that lack of oversight led to the Great Recession; there are certainly other areas where ham-handed regulatory policies have been distinctly unhelpful. But taking a position that all regulation is bad and must be resisted is insane. What about nursing home regulations that protect grandma from abuse? What about food and drug regulations that keep dog feces out of your beanie-weenies, or water purity standards, or building codes, or….Well, you get the point.

And how about that “cutting taxes across the board” and “sending the money back to the feds” promise?

Just how does our “I wanna be your governor” Pence propose to fund anything Indiana needs? Federal dollars pay for our roads, augment our (increasingly inadequate) police forces, and provide medical care for the indigent. They feed schoolchildren and support special education programs. Federal dollars fund small businesses (yes, it turns out that even the angry guy in the anti-Obama commercial who insists that he and his sons built their business all by themselves had an 800,000 SBA loan). The federal government funds 33% of Indiana’s budget; if we sent that money back and cut taxes, Indiana’s government would come to a screeching halt.

The Ryans and the Pences of this world are counting on our ignorance. They are con men, hustlers secure in their (unfortunately reasonable) belief that voters don’t know where their tax dollars go, don’t recognize when they themselves benefit from government programs, and have no idea how their government works or what it does.

Con artists are successful because they tell us what we want to hear, because they promise us we can have something for nothing. The ugly truth is that the people who fall for the con are the people who want to believe they can get something for nothing.

Pence and Ryan are as reputable as that Nigerian banker who will send you a million dollars if you can just front him a few thousand.

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The First Encouraging Sign

If reports are correct, later today John Gregg will finally announce a smart decision–one that will actually motivate, rather than depress, his Democratic base. According to Jim Shella, Gregg will announce that Vi Simpson will be his running mate.

One of my Facebook friends posted that she will “gag less” when she votes. Another noted that–while a Simpson/Gregg ticket would be better than a Gregg/Simpson one–the choice meant that he, too, would be a more enthusiastic supporter.

Vi Simpson brings major assets to the campaign. Cynics will attribute the choice to gender; Mike Pence picked a woman running mate, presumably to blunt the impact of the Republican war on women, so they’ll shrug and say Gregg countered with a female running mate of his own.

The cynics couldn’t be more wrong. Vi Simpson brings party legitimacy, legislative savvy and uncommon principle to the ticket. A long-serving, well-liked and effective legislator and party leader, she has also earned a reputation for calling it like it is. She has been a standard-bearer for doing the right thing–and not just for women. Thanks to her years of service, she also has instant name recognition.

Contrast that with Pence’s running mate, a freshman legislator few people have ever heard of, a woman who (among other things) voted to de-fund Planned Parenthood, and is thus unlikely to help him with women voters alienated by the GOPs assault on contraception and reproductive rights.

The November election is now a contest between a team of experienced public servants and a team composed of an ideologue who has never passed a bill and an unknown freshman legislator obviously chosen for her gender. If Hoosiers actually want their government to work–an open question, admittedly–the choice is now clear.

Game on.

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Indiana’s Choice

Now that the primaries are over, and the outlines of the gubernatorial campaign are getting clearer, it is beginning to look as if Hoosiers will have a choice between a candidate with bad ideas and one with no ideas.

The Star reports that Democrat John Gregg is advocating both a tax cut for businesses and the elimination of Indiana’s gasoline tax. He proposes to make up the lost gas tax revenue by “better management.” This at a time when government is struggling to provide basic services, and when all available evidence rebuts the tired rhetoric about tax cuts generating jobs and government funding services by cutting “waste.”

Add to these positions his anti-choice and anti-gay-rights pronouncements, and apparently, Gregg has decided to campaign as the non-Pence Republican.

Meanwhile, Pence has refused to take any policy positions. In 11+ years in Congress, he never passed a bill. He’s never held an administrative position, and–to use a Republican talking point–never made a payroll. He has never disclosed the slightest interest in the complexities of public policy.  The only thing he has done is sermonize and hector. In fact, given his holier-than-thou persona, it’s odd he didn’t just go into the clergy.

Unfortunately, one of these men will win in November. Rupert Boneham, the libertarian who has thus far made more sense than either of them, is simply not viable in a state and country that doesn’t elect third-party candidates.

So our choice–as my son frequently notes– is between a competent conservative from the 1950s, and a posturing theocrat from the 1590s.

Whoopie.

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Indiana’s Hangover

Well, we’ve had our “party”–yesterday was Primary Election day.

Today, we have to live with the hangover.

The most troubling result, of course, was the defeat of Dick Lugar by an embarrassing know-nothing unworthy to polish his shoes. I have posted several times about the pathetic campaign run by a once-towering statesman. Truth be told, Lugar has moved steadily to the right as the party’s base has migrated to the fringes, and a dignified retirement might have rescued his legacy. That said, to see a man of genuine stature defeated by a cartoon was hard to take.

Add to that ignominious defeat the victories of equally noxious GOP congressional candidates in safe districts–districts where the Primary is for all intents and purposes THE election–and Indianapolis and Indiana can kiss all of the good PR we generated from the SuperBowl good-by. By our dingbats we shall be known….

The open question is: what will Hoosiers do in November? Will we confirm our status as a buckle on the Bible Belt, electing Mike Pence (who, in his years in Congress, never managed to pass a single bill, but spent LOTS of time talking about what God wanted) and Tea Partier Richard Mourdock? Or will we come to our senses?

The Democrats running for Governor and Senator are, by national standards, conservative. (As my youngest son says about the Gregg-Pence matchup, we have a choice: we can go back to the 1950s or the 1590s.) Joe Donnelly is a “blue dog.” Neither will satisfy true progressives. But both are good people, savvy and compassionate and vastly preferable to Pence and Mourdock.

To all my Republican friends who voted for Dick Lugar, and all my Democratic friends who swallowed hard, took a GOP Primary ballot and did likewise, let me echo the Facebook message posted this morning by a friend from Lafayette: Our job is to ensure that there is NEVER a Senator Mourdock. To which I’ll add: or a Governor Pence.

The last thing we need is “hair of the dog.”

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