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| Reuters photo by John Sommers |
Michael Barbaro and Monica Davey report for The New York Times: “Leslie Lenkowsky, a former professor at Indiana University who has known Mr. 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." . . . 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.”
As a talk-radio show host in 1998, "Long after government regulators had confirmed the lethal consequences of cigarette smoking, Mike Pence mocked their warnings as 'hysteria'," the reporters write. "And long after Republicans’ war on big government was fading, [Congressman] Pence defiantly opposed his own party over the creation of signature programs like No Child Left Behind and a Medicare prescription drug benefit. . . . 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 Mr. 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."
Many small-town folks would describe themselves as Pence typically does: “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” The reporters note, "Those animating forces were at the center of the most consequential – and controversial – decision Mr. 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 Mr. Pence’s state, forcing him to revise the law in a compromise that infuriated both sides of the debate."
from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/29KZ1Pk Mike Pence says he's a small-town guy, and he is - Entrepreneur Generations
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