The ghosts of Mike Pence’s past

| 7:00 pm EDT October 25, 2023
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There are few things more sad and poignant than a failed dreamer. To dream is to live, to imagine, and to hope. But there is a certain quantity of people who dream of things that are simply unattainable and impossible to achieve. We have a specific person in the presidential race on the Republican side who is one of those people.

For Mike Pence, it’s been a long road. He, more than almost anyone, came dangerously close to the American insurrection on January 6. I imagine he had to take a second look at himself, his mortality, and what he wanted out of life. These types of things, when they happen, cannot be easy.

And there was a brief time when I felt for Mike Pence. Those days are long behind me though. “The media has already decided how all this is going to end,” he told an Iowa Pizza Ranch this week.

This was yet another Iowa campaign stop as Pence can be seen traipsing about a country full of Pence campaign stops. But alas, Pence is not exactly campaigning high on the hog. His crowds are sparse, with very few people showing up to hear the hopes, dreams, and promises of a new day — a new day brought to you by Mike Pence.

Pence is hopelessly out of his depth. He really seems to imagine he has a chance. He dreams of a more perfect world where women stay at home nurturing the babies they parent, as abortion becomes a thing of the past. Pence imagines a sort of time capsule where the world is frozen in time, not as it is now, but as it was many, many years ago.

That is why he can’t win. Mike Pence is a man who lives in the past, breathing the air of another era. He does not want to take the world forward; he wants a time travel machine where we can go back in time, where life was simpler, and easier, especially for Conservative white men such as him.

And of course, Pence would lead that imaginary world. There would be no LGTBQ people. There would be few women working. There would only be Pence, snugly surrounded by people who looked like him, thought liked him and behaved like him.

It is his dream, the thing he covets to insanity. It can’t happen, and Mike Pence DOESN’T know it. So he will likely continue for a while to be a ghost of the past, forlornly popping up at small campaign events, eyes firmly in the past, brain yearning for something that can never be. And by the way — that Pizza Ranch in Iowa he stopped at? Fifteen people were in the audience.