Twenty years ago, Mike Pence was left for dead politically after flaming out in his second run for Congress.

Now, he is choosing whether to make a bid for the U.S. presidency or the Indiana governor’s mansion. Or he could remain a leading conservative voice in the U.S. House, where he has served since 2001. Pence has said he will announce his decision by the end of the month.

A lot has changed in 20 years – Pence’s congressional district certainly, the nation’s electoral landscape from time to time, and Pence himself.

“I thank God often that we were not elected the first few times we tried,” Pence, 51, said in an interview last week in New Castle. “During the years that followed, (wife) Karen and I were able to start a family, start a business and really grow in our depth of understanding about conservative policy and human common sense.”

It has been said that Pence spent the 1990s in the political wilderness. In fact, he kept a high profile among conservative Hoosiers with a radio talk show, a TV talk show and as president of the Indiana Policy Review, a think tank in Fort Wayne.

“My years on the radio were not so much learning how to articulate conservative ideas as they were listening to Hoosiers every day and hearing the goodness and the decency and the common sense of everyday Hoosiers,” Pence said.

“What I learned, and it gave me confidence when I eventually arrived in Washington, D.C., is that everyday Americans understand America; everyday Americans understand what makes this country great,” the Columbus, Ind., native said.

Byron Lamm, a Fort Wayne investments consultant and a director of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, watched Pence redefine himself and find his conservative voice in the ’90s.

“He went from being an attorney-slash-candidate to someone dealing with issues,” Lamm said. “A lot of it had to do with getting older and wiser and becoming a parent.”

Pence grew “more mature, more introspective,” Lamm said. “He went from someone who had three or four bullet points in a campaign to engaging you for 45 minutes on any question you asked him.”

Separately, both he and Pence mentioned a turning point: the essay Pence wrote in 1991 for the Indiana Policy Review titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.” It was a reference to his attack-dog style in trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Phil Sharp in east-central Indiana’s congressional district.

In Pence’s words at the time, the 1990 race was “one of the most divisive and negative campaigns in Indiana’s modern congressional history.”

Pence wrote, “It is wrong, quite simply, to squander a candidate’s priceless moment in history, a moment in which he or she could have brought critical issues before the citizenry, on partisan bickering.”

Ray Scheele, a political science professor at Ball State University, remembers the 1990 campaign, when Pence questioned whether Sharp would profit from the sale of a family farm to the state of Illinois. The Pence camp also ran an ad depicting a stereotypical Arab sheik thanking Sharp, an energy policy leader in the Democratic House, for America’s dependence on foreign oil. Sharp’s campaign in turn called out Pence for paying personal expenses with campaign donations.

The back-and-forth “just knocked the underpinnings from Pence’s candidacy,” Scheele said. Pence got only 41 percent of the vote after attracting 47 percent in his first campaign against Sharp.

Scheele, co-director of the Bowen Center for Public Affairs at Ball State, also recalls Pence’s confession. Pence “asked for absolution,” he said, and called for candidates to stick to their convictions.

“And he has pretty much lived up to that” as a congressman, Scheele said.

Grateful supporters

At a town hall meeting in New Castle on Monday, Pence showed what he’s learned from 10 years in broadcasting and 10 years in Congress.

Dressed casually in a navy sweater and tan slacks, the white-haired Pence was relaxed and loose as he fielded questions, gesturing constantly as he spoke, remaining on his feet for more than an hour. He covered a lot of ground – the Tucson, Ariz., shootings, the federal debt, Martin Luther King Jr., a constituent’s mortgage problems and more.

•On his speech to the Detroit Economic Club: “A Rotary on steroids.”

•On his past: “Some people say I was conservative before it was cool.”

•On his wish to make permanent the temporary extension of the Bush-era income tax cuts: “We don’t have a temporary economy, so why do we have a temporary tax code?”

•On his political ambitions: “The highest office I will serve is Karen’s husband and Mike, Charlotte and Audrey’s dad.”

The supportive crowd of roughly 100 people ate it up.

“Thank you for your service to the country,” Paul Chew, 78, owner of an excavating company, told Pence. “We’re behind you 100 percent.”

No opposition was heard. Two other constituents thanked him as well – one “for all you’ve done for us,” the other “for representing us so well.”

After the meeting, Chew was asked what elected office Pence should pursue.

“I’d like to see him as president,” he said.

In July, The Hill newspaper in Washington ranked what it called “the 25 hardest-working lawmakers” among 535 House and Senate members. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, placed first. Pence, the only Hoosier lawmaker on the list, came in 19th despite reserving Sundays for “church and family.”

‘Change of heart’

David McIntosh paved the way for Pence to reach the House.

After 20 years in Congress, Sharp did not seek re-election in 1994. McIntosh, who grew up in Kendallville and had worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, was elected as part of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution.

McIntosh was the Republican nominee for governor in 2000, leaving his congressional seat open in the May primary.

“At first, Mike and Karen didn’t want to run for my seat,” said McIntosh, who lost to Gov. Frank O’Bannon in the fall election. “They weren’t going to be doing it as a combat sport.”

McIntosh, now a government affairs and regulatory lawyer in Washington for the law firm Mayer Brown, cited “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.”

“That change of heart for public service has carried him through the last 10 years,” McIntosh said.

Pence won election to the House with 51 percent of the vote in his district, which today is a 19-county region that stretches from southern Allen County to just west of Cincinnati. With a three-way fight for the 2000 Democratic nomination, “there was a lot of money spent in that primary that was down the drain,” Scheele said. “Pence hasn’t been seriously challenged since. So Pence has never really been tested.”

The district has changed considerably since Sharp, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was entrenched. The exodus of manufacturing jobs from Muncie, Anderson and Richmond greatly reduced the Democrats’ labor base. Pence has received at least 60 percent of the vote in every election since 2002.

Instead of having to campaign constantly to keep his seat, Pence was climbing the Republican leadership ranks.

“It certainly wasn’t intentional,” he said last week. “My first term in Congress I found myself at odds with the Bush administration over No Child Left Behind. My second term in Congress, (then Pennsylvania Rep.) Pat Toomey and I led the effort among Republicans against the Medicare prescription drug bill.

“My involvement in those battles built relationships and got us noticed by colleagues in ways that opened the door to me being tapped to be a chairman of the conservative caucus, the Republican Study Committee.”

He ran against John Boehner of Ohio for House minority leader in 2006. Boehner won easily, 168-27, but later recruited Pence for the No. 3 job, chairman of the GOP conference.

“John Boehner really wanted to see our party in Congress steer back to some common-sense conservative principles, and he wanted me to play a role in that, and I think we’ve played some small role,” said Pence, who frequently uses “we” when speaking about himself.

Basically, Pence became a leading spokesman for the Republican brand and a frequent guest on the talk-show circuit. When he took the job, Republicans had just lost 21 seats in the 2008 House election and were down to 174 members. When he left the post this year, the GOP was fresh off an election in which they won a commanding 242-193 House majority.

Belief system

Pence along the way attracted notice as a prospective candidate for president. In September, he won a straw poll of more than 700 social conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, beating Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, among others.

The crowd “loved” Pence, wrote Nicole Allan of The Atlantic, adding that “Pence’s cadences were so well-tuned that at times he sounded like a voice-over from an action-movie trailer.”

Lamm, of the Indiana Policy Review, said Pence “has always been good on his feet, and he doesn’t stray from his beliefs.”

McIntosh said that “because (Pence) has been a leader who hasn’t really picked fights with people and stands for across-the-board conservative ideas, he is one person who people can say they’d really like to support.”

Pence has often described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” He said last week he favors “less government, less taxes, strong defense, traditional values.” He has declined to seek earmarks – congressional spending for projects in his district – since 2008.

“By the time I arrived in Washington, compassionate conservatism was in the saddle,” Pence said. “Someone said memorably that compassionate conservatism was just another phrase for big-government Republicans. … You had leading conservative voices praising big-government Republicanism. … I never bought it.”

The game of political dominoes that got Pence elected to Congress in 2000 might help determine where his name appears on the 2012 ballot. When Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman announced she would not run for governor, speculation began that Pence would seek the office, allowing Gov. Mitch Daniels to be the lone Hoosier in the GOP presidential race.

“He has a social conservative base, he can raise money, and he has national contacts,” Scheele said of Pence. “He’s a pretty smart politician, he’s ambitious, and he’s laid the groundwork to be a competitor” for president or governor.

Plus, Scheele said, “he genuinely believes what he says.”

In defeat, Pence wrote in his 1991 confession, “as unaddressed issue piles upon unaddressed issue, it seems more grievous that I left my supporters so few clues as to how I would have governed differently.”

Now they know.

bfrancisco@jg.net