The pitch for Pence and Palin fans

This article talks about potential veep picks, and happily, Sarah Palin is still on the list. The list includes Rep. Eric Cantor, but if we're going to talk members of the House, why omit Mike Pence? I like Pence, and he is someone who I think should run for President eventually. Still, he and Cantor both face a problem: given a choice, Americans do not elect Senators, still less Congressmen, to the Presidency.

So what’s Pence's route to the Oval Office? If we’re ready to write off the Presidency through 2016, Pence could run for Governor of Indiana in 2012, and try to leapfrog thence four years later. As gloomy as four years of Obama might be, though, eight years amounts to a new age of darkness. So the foregoing question really ought to encourage Pence fans to shelve whatever intramural disagreements the party has with McCain,1 because if McCain wins, by contrast, Pence could be appointed to a cabinet position and gain needful experience there. One can imagine a fairly neat lineage: McCain/Palin ’08, Palin/Pence ’12.

That lineage does mean getting behind the candidate, though, even if he isn’t your first preference; in the nature of investing is accepting a cost now in order to reap a reward later. Alternatively, we can take our chances, and see what we get with eight years of a very liberal administration, backed with a Congress whose leadership is very liberal, and who will have a more robustly liberal Supreme Court before (not to mention long after) its end. That strikes me as a dangerous voyage in an unseaworthy vessel, but you know, people go over Niagara Falls in barrels, and some have even survived. Not something I’d like to chance, however.

1. 1. Something that I hear semi-often is that McCain’s defeat this year would be acceptable because it would catalyze a return to first principles and a return to power in four years (but cf. SF: The Value of Losing (1/5/08) (discussing the notion that McCain's defeat will ionize the GOP in the opposite direction)). I think that’s Pollyannaish. For one thing, it’s unprecedented. It would seriously misread history to suggest that Reagan’s victory in 1980 was catalyzed by Ford’s defeat four years earlier, rather than being the culmination of a lengthy process kicked off by (inter alios) Goldwater and Buckley. Speaking of Goldwater, the 1964 election is an even worse analog: Goldwater’s defeat may have helped realign the party in the direction that ultimately led to Reagan, but it did so because conservatives were united with the candidate rather than fighting him off. Indeed, to the extent that there is recent historical precedent, it cuts the other way. In 1992, conservatives rebelled against Bush 41; the result was not that a more palatable GOP candidate won the 1996 election. (That’s not to ignore the intervening revolution in Congress, but does reject the idea that the two are related.)