Although he is always preternaturally placid, Mike Pence today exemplifies a Republican conundrum. Sitting recently 24 blocks from Capitol Hill, where he served six terms as a congressman, and eight blocks from the White House, which some Republicans hope he craves, Pence, now in his third year as Indiana’s governor, discussed two issues, Common Core and Medicaid expansion, that illustrate the following:
Today’s president, whose prior governmental experience was meager and entirely legislative, probably has strengthened voters’ normal preference for actual executives — governors rather than legislators — as chief executives. Governors actually govern, which means continually making choices and compromises. So, with the Republican nominating electorate increasingly persnickety about ideological purity, governors often are more disadvantaged than senators as candidates.
In 2001, as a freshman congressman, Pence was one of just 34 House Republicans to vote against President George W. Bush’s pride and joy, the No Child Left Behind education legislation, which Pence considered a federal usurpation of a state and local responsibility, K-12 education. In 2010, with the Obama administration blandishing $5 billion in Race to the Top funds as bribes, Indiana was among the 37 states that embraced Common Core standards. Under Pence, however, Indiana became the first state to formally withdraw from Common Core.
But because some critics consider the standards that Pence’s administration wrote insufficiently unlike Common Core’s, he is excoriated as insufficiently hostile to “Obamacore.” But the content of the Common Core standards is beside the point. Even excellent content would not redeem Common Core, because it abets what Pence correctly says will, unless Common Core is stopped, eventually become federal micromanagement of K-12 education. If Hoosiers want different standards, Pence says, they now are forever free to write them.