With the 2024 presidential election a mere 590 or so days in the distance, few so-called news stories could interest me less on the upslope of 2023 than candidate kabuki at the start of a 19-month pregame show.
My general policy for the 2024 race is: Wake me when it’s 2024, but former Vice President Mike Pence woke me over the weekend with his remarks at Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner, a dubious forum for bipartisan humor among Beltway insiders and their journalistic acquaintances.
Pence is delusional, which, of course, is the thing that makes him most plausible as a Republican presidential nominee. He somehow believes there’s a yearning for his candidacy on a landscape where the left despises him, the hard right was last seen trying to hang him, and there’s little but his low-wattage conservatism to interest anyone in between.
