Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) exhorted Republicans Friday to rally against fiscal excess, promising a conservative crowd that the country is “on the verge of a great American awakening.”
Pence, the House GOP conference chairman, said the simmering unrest that led to Tea Parties since the spring and the march in Washington last month reflected a country angry about the expansion of government.
“It’s authentic and it’s real and it’s powerful and it’s American,” Pence told about 2,000 conservatives at the annual conference of Americans for Prosperity, a free-market group.
The five-term Hoosier said of the movement: “The politicians aren’t leading this. They shouldn’t be leading it. They’re the ones that created this mess.”
The dinner was filled with the sort of grassroots conservatives who are the foot soldiers in GOP campaigns – and are the same sort who Pence has been meeting with in travels around the country this year, including a stop in Iowa.
In an interview following his remarks, Pence didn’t exactly knock down interest in a presidential campaign.
“I have no plans to run for president,” Pence said with a chuckle. But then he repeated the same less-than-Shermanesque phrase precisely twice more.
Pence finished a surprise fourth in a recent straw poll at a national social conservative conference and has sought to take a higher profile advocating for his party. He handed a reporter a business card-sized handbill with his picture over his name and the slogan, “Standing Strong.” The back of the card touts his website, and sites on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Hailing from a rural Indiana congressional district and with little financial base to draw from, Pence would be the longest of presidential longshots.
As a former talk show host he does, however, know how to rouse an audience.
He received numerous standing ovations from the audience during his speech and also won laughs with his well-honed timing, spot-on impressions of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and a bit of an equal-opportunity jab at the media.
“The New York Times said thousands of Americans gathered,” Pence said of the 9/12 march before adding: “Fox News Channel said there were a billion.”
But Pence, delivering what an aide says was a new stump speech, also demonstrated how little scrutiny he’s used to receiving, suggesting at one point that this era was as dark as during the depths of the Civil War.
In the speech, Pence twice said that Americans were weary of the “runaway spending under both parties” and recalled his dismay at the passage of the financial bailout last fall in the last months of the Bush administration.
“They rolled us,” Pence said without specifying who he meant.
But he aimed most of his fire at the Democrats who control the capital now, mocking and portraying as indulgent President Obama’s decision this week to fly to Denmark to advocate for Chicago’s failed Olympics bid.
“After those first-round results it looks like the president has had about as much luck pitching Chicago to the Olympics as he had pitching healthcare reform to the American people,” Pence said, drawing laughs and applause as the keynote speaker at the conservative organization’s dinner banquet, held in an Arlington, Va., hotel.
He described the president’s effort to bring the Olympics to America as “flying on one more foreign junket to one more glamorous capital as our nation continues to struggle in the city and on the farm.”
Doling out more red meat, Pence won a roar when he added a new ending to a familiar saying: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose your job and a recovery is when
Nancy Pelosi loses her job.”
His goals for now, he said in the interview, are to elect Republicans to Congress and to encourage the movement he described to the audience.
He emphasized that the fervor is not inherently Republican nor Democratic, but sidestepped a question about whether incumbents of both parties ought to be concerned.
He told the crowd, though, that the people are siding with Republicans now — and that could mean the GOP re-taking Congress next year.
In the meantime, “a minority in Congress plus the American people equals a majority,” Pence said.
<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/27869.html>
No, Mike, the American people are NOT falling for your bullshit. You have alienated everyone outside the ultra-loyal 30 percent of Americans who are crazy.
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