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Mike Pence kicked off his pointless campaign on Wednesday. Yesterday, we described why this is a waste of everyone's time, so we won't repeat it here and won't devote a lot of time to him going forward unless he does something very unexpected (e.g., announces that any woman donating $10,000 to his campaign gets to have dinner alone with him).
His announcement video is quite snazzy and emotional:
It demonstrates clearly that he knows who to hire to make an impressive and patriotic 3-minute video that mentions God a whole bunch of times. But it won't help. The problem isn't the quality of the video. The problem is quality of the candidate. He's the wrong person for this moment. In fact, he's the wrong person for just about any moment since, oh, Jan. 1, 1850 or so. He has the wrong stuff. It would take a monumental collapse of half a dozen other candidates for him to get the nomination.
Unlike Chris Christie, who is going to focus on New Hampshire, Pence will focus on Iowa. The former VP might even ignore New Hampshire entirely. He has a chance to do well in Iowa because the state is full of evangelicals. But once Pence has to compete is states not chock-a-block with evangelicals, like New Hampshire and Nevada, he is going to tank. (V)