Mike Pence at Hillsdale: 'The Presidency and the Constitution'

Congressman Mike Pence spoke at Hillsdale College Monday night at the invitation of the Young Republicans. I attended the dinner held in his honor before the talk, briefly chatted with him, and listened with care and interest to his talk – which had as its subject “the Presidency and the Constitution.”

Pence, who has represented Indiana’s ninth district in Congress since 2001, attended Hanover College not far from Madison, Indiana – where my grandfather once owned a dry goods store. There, I knew, he had studied with my friend G. M. Curtis. On that ground alone, I figured that he might be worth hearing.

Pence is exceptionally articulate. Before entering Congress, he had done a six-year-long stint as a talk-radio host. In Congress, he emerged quickly as a conservative leader. To his great credit, he voted against two initiatives pressed by George W. Bush – No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit – and, in 2005, he was unanimously elected the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Group.

In 2006, Pence ran against John Boehner for the post of minority leader in the House, calling for the Republican Party to return to its “small-government ideology,” and he lost. Two years later, however, in a move suggestive of Pence’s stature and of Boehner’s wiliness, the new minority leader recruited his onetime rival to head the House Republican Conference Group. For this office, Pence ran unopposed.

Pence’s lecture Monday night was impressive.

I suspect that, before long, Hillsdale will post it on the internet. I have been around for a while; I have been politically alert since I was twelve; and I can honestly say that I have never heard a politician deliver a lecture as intellectually ambitious as this one.

In my judgment, the talk needs tweaking here and there. It contained a brief digression on the Emperor Constantius that was out of place. Pence’s delivery was too slow and his gestures too studied. It was, as a friend observed, stagy and a mite bit awkward. He would do well to relax and simply be himself.

What stood out, however, was the substance of what he had to say – for his lecture was a thoughtful rumination on the role reserved for the President under the Constitution. And without directly attacking the current incumbent, he left little doubt that Barack Obama has no notion of what it means to be presidential.

Pence’s argument was nicely nuanced. In the domestic sphere, he called for presidential modesty. It is not appropriate that a President command or seek to rule. His task is to execute the law and to defend and preserve the Constitution and the country, not to seek to transform it. He is, Pence insisted, our servant, not our master; and a President who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse. He is likely to be thrown.

In foreign affairs, in contrast, modesty is out of place. The President should loom large on the world stage. He should bow to no king. When abroad, he should never criticize the United States. It is his task to defend our interests and our way of life, and he should do so with vigor, skill, and grace. Above all, he should never lead us into a war that he does not fully intend to win.

I cannot here do full justice to Pence’s talk. To grasp fully what he had to say, one would have to listen to it two or three times and read it with care. What I can testify is that Pence has taken great care to think through what has gone wrong vis-à-vis the Presidency in recent years. I doubt that there is anyone in Congress who has a better understanding of the office and the duties associated with it.

I would not at all be surprised were Pence to make a run for the Republican nomination in 2012. If he is to do so with any chance of success, he will have to think a bit about how to present himself before an audience in a more natural and relaxed fashion. But this is clearly something that he can do.

Some will note out that no one has moved directly from the House of Representatives to the Presidency since James Garfield ran in 1880, and they have a point. But we live in an extraordinary time – when, in the political sphere, extraordinary things are happening.

Pence’s political instincts are as good as those of Sarah Palin; there is no one on the horizon who is more principled; and he is an exceedingly well-educated and thoughtful man with ample political experience. Garfield once remarked, “The ideal college is [Williams College president] Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” I suspect that Pence would say the same with regard to G. M. Curtis.

Pence bears close watching. The only thing that he lacks is executive experience – which is, as I have noted in a series of posts archived here, usually for good reason thought requisite. If the campaign that, I believe, he is plotting does not catch fire, he might make a first-rate vice-presidential nominee.