Lost Pence: Media clip shows former VP's rise to power
Former Vice President Mike Pence was on-air for years in Indiana, but tapes have been hard to find. Indiana PR Pro Ken Owen unearthed multiples.
Oh, mother.
Veteran Indiana communications pro Ken Owen has unearthed a trove of Mike Pence tapes from his days on TV in Indianapolis. Owen posted an episode of “The Mike Pence Show” from late 1998, as the effort to impeach then-President Bill Clinton, was under way in Congress to his page on Rumble late Friday.
Pence moderates the roughly 30-minute panel focusing on Clinton’s 1998 military strike against Iraq, “Desert Fox”, and whether that was designed to distract from the GOP-led impeachment saga. Democratic defense attorney Linda Pence (no relationship), former Reagan White House lawyer Peter Rusthoven and Pence’s own mentor, Hanover history professor George M. Curtis III, make up the panel.
“You’re an American historian of some note, is Congressional criticism of a president at a time of the use of military force very unusual?” Pence asks Curtis in the show.
“No, not at all. And it’s been going on since, what, the 1790s. The criticism of John Adams, for instance and his foreign policy with France was wild. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was part of that,” Curtis, who goes by Jim (G.M.), said.
As a standalone, Pence’s shows are fairly unremarkable — he’s mainline conservative, in line with most of the GOP’s thinking at that moment. But in whole, they’re fascinating as a window into a decade-long stretch which ultimately launched Pence on a 20-year winning streak, winning elections nonstop — first to Congress in 2000, then the Indiana governor’s office in 2012 and eventually the White House.
That streak ended in November 2020 when Pence and his running mate, Donald Trump, lost re-election. (Said running mate and a sizable minority of the country believe that Trump and Pence should be in the White House at this moment.)
That winning streak started with Pence building his visibility throughout the state, on his syndicated radio show and on TV. It built his name ID — the lingua franca of the political realm — so well that his opponents in the 2000 Republican primary complained to the FCC that he was violating the commission’s equal-time rule.
His radio program also formed a critical piece of his own story, as he described himself as the equivalent of “Rush Limbaugh on decaf”.
These Pence tapes have been very hard to come by, even as many of the best reporters around have worked to unearth them.
Then-Politico reporter Darren Samuelsohn discovered a valuable cache back in 2016.
I found some more while researching my biography of Pence, “Piety & Power” — including two of his debates when he was running for Congress, one from 1990 and another from 2000.
They offer glimpses into Pence’s style and development in the political arena.
In video I obtained for my Pence biography of the 1990 congressional debate between Pence and then-Rep. Phil Sharp, a Muncie Democrat, then-New York real estate developer Donald Trump was even used as a foil.
Look for more Pence coverage here at 24sight — perhaps even some additional long-lost clips of the former vice president.
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