Lol… Pence is just about as far right as any old school republican lol…..
But he also supported the ACA and expanded the medicaid program in Indiana.
Lol….
[quote]
As Bernie Sanders explained in so many words when he endorsed Hillary Clinton this week, Trump’s racism obscures the fact that much of his agenda—lower taxes, less environmental, and financial regulation, and so on—is familiar conservative sop for the GOP donor class. But with the partial exception of his enforcement-only views about immigration reform, Pence doesn’t stand for any of the things Trump promises to change about the Republican Party. To the contrary, his record and Trump’s agenda contradict one another in critical ways.
Consider:
Trump opposes cuts or changes to retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare; Pence backed radical reforms to those programs, and used to criticize President George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization plan because it wasn’t radical enough.
Pence supports the trade agreements Trump deplores.
Pence supported the war in Iraq. Whatever Trump once thought of that endeavor, he now criticizes Republicans who beat the drum for it in the most withering terms.
Pence is for most purposes a doctrinaire social conservative, business conservative, and neoconservative. He opens the Trump campaign up, in other words, to the kind of attacks that doomed the Romney campaign: war on women; war on the working class; war on everyone. His greatest defenses against these criticisms are that as Indiana governor he worked with the Obama administration to expand his state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act; and ultimately turned against legislation that would have allowed Indiana business owners to discriminate against LGBT people. But these are ultimately moderate, bread-and-butter-style decisions Pence won’t want to draw attention to.
The incompatibilities don’t end there. As much as they are ideological misfits, they’re also temperamental and geographic misfits.
Pence is a bad talker. He will have to explain his deviations from Trumpism, from opposing Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim travel, to supporting the Trans Pacific Partnership, to answering for any new Trump controversy in the weeks and months ahead, and he will do badly at it. By the same token, he will do a poor job explaining his views on everything from abortion to the health impact of smoking. And when it’s all over, it’s not even clear Pence can help Trump in Indiana—a state Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to win anyway—because his popularity is under water there.
Because he is neither erratic nor corrupt—because he doesn’t amplify Trump’s worst qualities—Pence is being celebrated as a sober and steadying force for Trumpland. Someone who might even make it easier to treat the major party campaigns as equivalents. But this is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
