PIETY AND POWER

Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House

By Tom LoBianco

After losing his first campaign for Congress, a penitent Mike Pence swore off the dark side of politics. In a confessional essay in 1991, he wrote that “negative campaigning is wrong” and set out rules for himself for the future. Any campaign, he said, “ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate,” must advance a goal greater than personal desire and should not be only “about winning.”

A quarter-century later, he signed onto the presidential ticket of a candidate who seemed to be the antithesis of the ideal Pence once envisioned. While Pence himself maintains a public dignity and eschews vitriol against opponents in keeping with his long-ago atonement, he has tethered himself to a president who revels in negative campaigning, makes winning his all-consuming aspiration and has rarely been accused of an excess of human decency.

That Faustian bargain makes Pence one of the most intriguing yet least understood figures in American politics today. What mix of ambition, duty, principle and expedience led him to the vice presidency in the White House of Donald J. Trump? How does a devoted evangelical Christian serve a foulmouthed, thrice-married vulgarian who boasts of grabbing women by their private parts and paid hush money to a porn star alleging an extramarital affair? What virtues does Pence see in Trump? Does he genuinely admire him the way he seems to in those rapturous photo ops? Or does he secretly see himself as the last grown-up in the room, keeping things from being worse?

Tom LoBianco asks all the right questions in “Piety & Power,” his crisp and engaging biography of the vice president, but the answers remain elusive. As a reporter in Indiana, LoBianco covered Pence’s rise for The Associated Press and Indianapolis Star. He tells us of a boy from a plain Midwestern upbringing who explored the intersection of faith and politics and became a radio host, congressman and governor. But LoBianco is left — along with the rest of us — to wonder at the interior life that Pence guards so zealously.