The Pence Possibility

An independent campaign to draw Congressman Michael Pence into the 2012 presidential race is under way, the Associated Press is reporting this morning, and it is clearly one to watch. An email alerting us to the story was sent by Ralph Benko, a former Reagan aide who is working to draft the Hoosier. It’s too early for any endorsement, but there are a lot of things we like about the Mr. Pence, including a strong foreign policy position honed, among other places, during his years on the Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is a Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan supply-side Republican. But the feature of his emerging platform that most attracts us is the fact that when Mr. Pence talks about what needs to be done to pull us out of our economic predicament the number one item on his list is sound money.

He laid this out in a speech last year at the Detroit Economic Club, where he declared, “Sound monetary policy is the foundation of our prosperity. A strong dollar means a strong America.” He quoted Lawrence Kudlow as saying, “The Fed can print money, but it can’t print jobs.” He opposed the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing. He said he wasn’t laying blame “solely at the feet of the Federal Reserve.” The problem for the Fed, he said, began in 1977 with Humphrey-Hawkins, which imposed the dual mandate that requires the Fed to look not only at stabilizing prices but at maximizing employment.

The congressman didn’t come right out and declare for a gold standard, though he acknowledged that such is what Jack Kemp, were he alive today, would have urged him to do. But he did swing behind the call by the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoelick, to “re-think the international currency system, including the role of gold” — and, Mr. Pence added, “I agree.” The time has come, he said, “to have a debate over gold and the proper role it should play in our nation’s monetary affairs.”

That puts Mr. Pence in a group of political leaders who are forming an avant-garde for what we believe will be the most important issue in 2012. These figures range from Ron Paul, who is the grand old man of the movement for sound money, to Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who asked the famous question that got Chariman Bernanke to confess he didn’t know what to make of the collapse in the gold value of the dollar, to Sarah Palin, who first addressed the collapse of the dollar — it’s now down to little more than a 1,400^th of an ounce of gold — in a speech in Hong Kong and has, more recently, made the highest profile challenge to Chairman Bernanke on the Fed’s campaign of quantitative easing.

Our view is that the right place for the debate Mr. Pence speaks of is in the presidential campaign of 2012 . President Obama, who will meet the Chinese communist party boss, Hu Jintao, this week at Washington, is positioning his administration to stand for a weaker dollar and a stronger Chinese communist scrip. But the uncertainty, the faulty price signals, and the difficulties in borrowing that bedevil Americans are not a matter simply of the relative price of the dollar against foreign paper. They can be traced to the fact that our currency has been cut loose from anything of real, permanent value. What an opportunity for the Republicans, and the movement to draft Mike Pence offers yet one more chance that there will be a politician prepared to seize it.