Mike Pence: A conservative proudly out of sync with his times

Long after government regulators had confirmed the lethal consequences of cigarette smoking, Mike Pence mocked their warnings as "hysteria" in 1998.

"Time for a quick reality check," he wrote. "Smoking doesn't kill."

Long after most members of Congress had abandoned the quaint practice of delivering one-minute morning speeches, Pence eagerly held court in an empty chamber, musing about sports and Scripture.

And long after Republicans' war on big government was fading, Pence defiantly opposed his own party over the creation of signature programs like No Child Left Behind and a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Throughout his career as a congressman, radio host and governor, Gov. Michael Richard Pence of Indiana, Donald Trump's running mate, has been deeply and proudly out of sync with his times.

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With his formal bearing, shiny helmet of white hair and carefully chosen, slowly delivered words, he is a throwback in his demeanor. With his deep social conservatism, public religiosity and aversion to negative campaigning, he is a throwback in his political style.

He is so abstemious that he once declared that, to avoid temptation, he would never appear anywhere alcohol was served unless his wife was with him.

This has earned Pence, 57, both the admiration of Republican voters who identify with his homespun manner and the frustration of outsiders who see him as a dangerous anachronism.

Leslie Lenkowsky, a former professor at Indiana University who has known Pence for 20 years, said that in an age of business-minded governors who deliberately avoid touchy social issues, "Mike sees himself as a champion of a very culturally conservative set of values that represent small-town Middle America."

"He sees his role," Lenkowsky said, "as protecting them."

In interviews, Pence describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order."

Those animating forces were at the center of the most consequential — and controversial — decision Pence made as governor: signing a 2015 law that could have made it easier for religious conservatives to refuse service to gay couples just as same-sex marriage was spreading across the country.

The national firestorm generated by the law was so fierce that sports leagues, trade groups and technology companies threatened to boycott Pence's state, forcing him to revise the law in a compromise that infuriated both sides of the debate.

For many Americans, it was a searing introduction to Pence. But for those who have closely tracked his career, it fit a long-standing pattern: the winds of change might blow, but Pence is slow to bend.

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By the time he was elected to Congress in 2000, after two failed tries, Pence had missed the Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich and his scrappy, fiscally conservative acolytes who stormed Washington in 1994. Nobody, it seemed, had told Pence that the rebellion was over. He arrived in the House determined to slash federal spending and shrink the role of government.

It was not to be: House Republicans, led by President George W. Bush, created giant new programs like Medicare Part D and spent trillions bailing out Wall Street after the financial crisis.

"I was like the frozen man," Pence said of his poor timing in a 2004 speech. "Frozen before the revolution; thawed after it was over. A minuteman who showed up 10 years too late."

He left little mark on the institution: During his 12-year congressional career, he introduced 90 bills and resolutions. None became law.

Showing up late, by many accounts, was his fate as governor, too. By the time he was elected, his popular predecessor, Gov. Mitch Daniels, along with a Republican Legislature, had checked off almost every box on the conservative wish list: shrunken budgets, privately managed health care for state workers and a voucher program that allowed public students to attend private schools.

"Mitch Daniels dominated Indiana politics for the better part of 10 years," said Michael D. McDaniel, who was the Indiana Republican chairman from 1995 until 2002. "Mike Pence would be the first person to tell you that he knew that was going to be a tough act to follow."

So far, he has struggled to carve out a national reputation beyond his polarizing pursuit of socially conservative causes. In an echo of his actions on gay rights, he signed a strict new law in March that bans abortions based solely on the fetus having a disability such as Down syndrome. The measure inflamed many women and abortion-rights activists across the country and now faces a court challenge.

"A society," Pence said at the time, "can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable — the aged, the infirm, the disabled and the unborn."

His conservatism, friends said, is firmly rooted in his Indiana childhood, a postcard from a tranquil Midwest of the 1960s. The son of a gas station manager, he was a quiet altar boy whose favorite childhood memory was playing in a neighborhood creek.

In college, he gravitated from his family's Catholicism to evangelical Christianity after a fraternity brother at Hanover College "challenged me to take seriously the claims of Christ," Pence later recalled on the House floor.

His small-town, plain-spoken personality was the centerpiece of his early campaigns. In 1988, during his first run for Congress, he rode a single-speed bicycle across 261 miles of his district to meet voters.

He lost.

But his feel for the local mood and mores allowed him to master a form of communication that proved pivotal to his political rise: talk radio. After he lost the 1988 campaign, and another in 1990, "The Mike Pence Show" became his tether to voters across Indiana and a springboard into the world of national conservatives.

And it paved the way for his eventual victory in a 2000 race for Congress.

By then, Pence had made a declaration that could complicate his new political partnership with Trump, whose style leaves no rival unscathed. He swore off personal attacks on campaign opponents, saying he regretted his tactics against his two-time Democratic rival, Rep. Phil Sharp.

In one 1990 campaign commercial, Pence hired an actor to play an Arab, dressed in stereotypical garb, who theatrically thanked Sharp for U.S. dependency on foreign oil.

"Negative campaigning, I now know, is wrong," Pence wrote in a contrite essay after he had lost to Sharp. In it, he quoted from the Bible about Jesus and sin. "A campaign," Pence posited, "ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate."

Sharp, in an interview, seemed unmoved. "To me, neither he nor Trump are of presidential timber," Sharp said.