Donald Trump has chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate.
Memo to Governor Pence: Buckle in. The media is coming for you.
One of the hard facts of political life for Republicans is that their vice presidential nominees have - for decades - been treated as if they had the figurative bullseye on their backs, replete with a sign that says “Hey hostile liberal media! Over here!”
The list?
1952 - California Senator Richard Nixon
1968 - Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew
1976 - Kansas Senator Bob Dole
1988 - Indiana Senator Dan Quayle
2008 - Alaska Governor Sarah Palin
In each of those five cases the press zeroed in on the new nominee alleging scandal, racism, a tendency to meanness, or just plain old fashioned incompetence and idiocy.
This syndrome began in 1952 with Nixon, then the up-and-coming 39-year-old VP choice for the hero-general GOP nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon, who had been elected to the US House a mere eight years earlier, had rocketed to early fame by successfully proving that one Alger Hiss, a Roosevelt/Truman administration State Department officer, had in fact been a Soviet spy. Worse for Nixon, Hiss was not just a liberal Democratic appointee of the day, he was a child of the day’s Eastern Establishment, replete with a degree from Harvard Law School and a clerkship for the much revered Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. From there Hiss had taken turns in prominent Boston and New York law firms before arriving with FDR’s New Deal in Washington, where he had variously worked in the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill before landing in the State Department where he was, among other things, an assistant to Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law-turned Assistant Secretary of State. Suffice to say, Hiss’s liberal Establishment credentials were in very polished working order.
Until the arrival of Nixon, the grocer’s son from California who attended not Harvard but Whittier College (can you say “class warfare”?) and had already discomfited liberals by defeating a prominent liberal congressman of the day. When allegations emerged that Hiss was a Communist spy - and had for years been an active member of a secret Communist cell -- Nixon, with his trademark birddog persistence, pursued the case. The long and short is that after a tumultuous investigation, very much in cloak and dagger style that involved ex-Communist turned Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers and State Department documents stashed (on microfilm) in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’ farm, Nixon got his man. In 1950 he was elected to the U.S. Senate after another tumultuous campaign against the liberal icon and actress-turned-congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas.
Thus by 1952, Nixon, placed on the ticket in a nod to conservatives (Ike had defeated conservative icon Robert Taft, and therefore felt the need for an olive branch) was already in the sights of the liberal media of the day. The weapon of choice was a fund Nixon (and other politicians) had had set up to enable donors to fund his political travel. Long story short again, the charge went up that Nixon had a “secret fund”, was in the pay of rich right-wing donors and living high off the hog.
It was a lie, but, hey, you know how this goes. The ever-smart Nixon took to television, then making its first debut in a serious way in a presidential campaign, bared his financial and emotional soul -- and won the hearts of the electorate. To the fury of his media opponents, the public rallied to Nixon, a move to dump him from Ike’s ticket was dumped, and on he went to the vice presidency.
Ironically, it was Nixon's choice of his own vice presidential nominee in 1968 that set off the next ruckus. That would be Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew. Agnew had initially been a liberal hero for defeating Democrat and segregationist George Mahoney in a 1966 governors race. Initially Agnew had supported another media favorite, the liberal GOP Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, for the 1968 nomination. But Rockefeller's indecision -- yes he would run, no he wouldn't, yes he might -- infuriated Agnew.
Agnew had already raised alarm with the media after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King had launched a wave of riots. Agnew, heretofore cheered for his rejection of racism from whites, ignited the wrath of liberals (not unlike ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has done today in taking on Black Lives Matter) by saying to the black leaders of his state that "I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have been unwilling to do." When VP-picking time arrived, Nixon, in an effort to reach out to the Rockefeller-wing yet not offend conservatives with a more liberal choice, picked Agnew.
It didn't take long for the media to react -- and racism was the chosen weapon. Agnew was heard on a campaign plane to refer to a longtime Baltimore reporter of Japanese descent as the "Fat Jap." The media grabbed hold, assailing Agnew as a racist. Agnew apologized, but the media die was cast. The man who was once a liberal media hero was now not only a racist, but a bumbling idiot. Nixon won anyway, and later Agnew would famously turn the tables with a 1969 speech in Des Moines, Iowa that -- gasp! -- attacked the media of the day.
As Tim Graham detailed here in a Media Reality Check, Agnew said, among other things, the following:
"We cannot measure this power and influence by traditional democratic standards. They can make or break -- by their coverage and commentary -- a moratorium on the war. They can elevate men from local obscurity to national prominence within a week. They can reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others. For millions of Americans, the network reporter who covers a continuing issue, like ABM or civil rights, becomes in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury.
We do know that, to a man, these commentators and producers live and work in the geographic and political confines of Washington D.C. or New York City -- the latter of which James Reston terms the 'most unrepresentative community in the entire United States.' Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism. We can deduce that these men thus read the same newspapers, and draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement ot their own viewpoints."
There was more - oh so much more - and the speech sent shock waves through a liberal media that was totally unaccustomed to this kind of treatment from one of its targets. What was significant in retrospect is that long before the advent of talk radio, Fox and the Internet, the ground was being laid for a major league divorce between the American people and the "trust factor" that the media was telling them the unvarnished, unbiased truth.
By 1976, when President Gerald Ford dumped Rockefeller as his VP to select Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a sharp tongued ex-RNC chairman, the media pounced again. Dole,a genuine war hero and serious legislative heavy weight, was suddenly portrayed as a sharp-tongued extreme right winger. When he pointedly observed during a vice presidential debate with Jimmy Carter's running mate Walter Mondale that World Wars I and II, not to mention Korea and Vietnam, had been "Democrat wars," the offended partisan media went ballistic. Suddenly the war hero and savvy legislator was a vicious, mean street fighter who shouldn't be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. The contrast with that Minnesota-nice Senator Mondale was made to be crystal clear. Ford, doubtless for other reasons but with no real help from his now "controversial" VP nominee, went on to lose.
Twelve years later, GOP nominee Vice President George H.W. Bush, in a bid to appease the conservatives of the day, selected the young and decidedly conservative Indiana Senator Dan Quayle. Quayle had compiled a respected career as a congressman and senator, zeroing in on both defense policy and economic issues.
Yet with his selection as Bush's VP nominee, the move was on in the media to trash the young conservative. His military service was an issue. (Four years later when it was shown that Democratic nominee Governor Bill Clinton had dodged the draft, no one in the media, mysteriously, seemed to care.) There was an attempt to raise controversy over a golf trip with a female lobbyist. Quayle, answering all of the deluge, was portrayed by the media as uncertain, out of his depth. Most famously, in a debate with the Democrats' VP nominee Lloyd Bentsen, a Quayle comparison to the length of his congressional career with that of John F. Kennedy's when Kennedy was elected president drew this remark from Bentsen: "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." The media dined out on this crack - and in fact still does. Bush won anyway, but Quayle's career was mortally wounded. A later presidential run ended after a few months in 1999. Another Bush was waiting in the wings.
Which brings us to 2008. GOP nominee Senator John McCain settled on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Palin, a conservative champion, had proven herself to be an effective governor, notably in the area of energy with Palin being a moving force behind a pipeline that would bring natural gas from the North Slope of Alaska to the lower 48 states.
Smart, talented and photogenic, Palin alas was unknown outside Alaska, and the liberal media long knives were out for her immediately. Her worst sins, of course, were that she was both a woman and an attractive woman. In the world of liberalism, all women and minorities are supposed to be liberals. Palin, outspokenly pro-life and the mother of a Down Syndrome child, was a vivid living testament that the liberal stereotype was a myth - which enraged her critics. The incoming from the media was almost immediate. She was depicted as stupid, ill-informed, an idiot. Saint Hillary she could not be allowed to become.
All of this treatment of GOP nominees for vice president, it should be noted, has but once been visited on their opposite numbers. In 1972, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern's choice of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton crashed and burned almost immediately after the convention when it emerged that Eagleton had suffered from depression and three-times been hospitalized for treatment, two of those times receiving electric shock therapy. Even for the liberal media of the day (later studies would show that reporters surveyed voted overwhelmingly for the liberal McGovern against then-President Nixon) this was a bridge too far. The media coverage piled on and McGovern was forced to drop Eagleton from the ticket, replacing him with Kennedy-in-law and onetime Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver.
But generally, Democratic VP nominees are treated lovingly by the liberal media. Notable here was 1968's Hubert Humphrey running mate and Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, who received glowing reviews in his race against opposite number Spiro Agnew. Twenty years later, as mentioned, Senator Bentsen, the Dukakis running mate, won rave reviews up against Dan Quayle. Other than Eagleton, the Democratic VP nominee who will get massive unfavorable press has not yet been seen.
So. With this history in mind, now we come to Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Like all those Republican VP nominees mentioned from Nixon to Palin, Pence is a man of considerable accomplishment as congressman and governor. But one can be forgiven for believing none of this will matter. One of the assets of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a runner-up in the Trump veepstakes, was that Gingrich has been around this block. He knows the media well, and has been a television combatant for years on CNN's Crossfire and elsewhere. If Gingrich knows anything - and he knows a lot - he understands how to take on his media critics.
Does Pence? We will find out soon enough. But make no mistake, from Nixon to Palin, the press has shown a repeated willingness to go after GOP vice presidential nominees and turn them into some embodiment of a racist/scandal-tarred/bumbling/incompetent idiot.
Welcome to the ticket, Governor Pence. Buckle in.
