Tully: Dear America, this is Mike Pence

Dear America:

I can tell you a lot about the job Mike Pence has done during his one term as governor. Good, bad and otherwise — there’s no shortage of material.

I could tell you about the discriminatory religious freedom bill he signed in 2015, the one that recklessly damaged his state. But that was such a fiasco that you may have all heard all about it. Or you may have seen the disastrous interview Pence did in the middle of that controversy with George Stephanopoulos, the one where he struggled to answer the most basic question imaginable: Is it OK to discriminate in Indiana?

I could tell you about an abortion bill he signed just this year, a bill so extreme that it meandered into issues such as miscarriages. It has since been ruled unconstitutional. It was another example of Pence leading with his far-right ideology.

On the plus side, there was the Medicaid expansion deal he worked out with the Obama administration two years ago, a deal that angered fellow conservatives, but rather thoughtfully put the concerns of uninsured Hoosiers ahead of his denunciations of Obamacare. And then there was his successful push in 2014 for a $10 million preschool pilot program, which was notable for being the first investment in preschool by Indiana state government, and for showing Pence as willing to buck fellow conservatives.

It was around the time of the preschool bill that I began to think that if Pence kept his focus on the right things he might emerge as a good governor. The problem, though, is that each time it looked like he was growing into the role, his ideology and partisan obsessions took over. For a leader with more policy heft and a mountain of ideas on how to improve his state, this might have balanced itself out. For a relative lightweight like Pence, a communicator more than a doer, it was disastrous.

I’ll get to the most disastrous example of all in a moment.

First, though, there is the otherwise. Parting ways with his talented first lieutenant governor, for instance, or attempting to create a state-sponsored news site that became a national joke.

In short, it’s been a term filled with plenty of news, capped off now by news that one of the nation’s most proudly religious and conservative governors is teaming up with Donald J. Trump. It’s a fitting end for a politician who always seemed more focused on the next step up than on the job of leading his home state.

To me, one unforgivable decision stands above everything else. For Pence, who truly does come across as the nicest guy in politics, it forever altered how I look at him. It made clear that his priorities too often lie in politics and ideology, and not in the nuts-and-bolts job of leading a state.

The decision came late in 2014. Following the creation of the preschool pilot program. The Pence administration and a host of other leaders and groups worked together on an ambitious federal preschool grant application. The feds had made clear that Indiana was likely to receive one of the largest shares of the available pot of money, perhaps $80 million, to not only provide scholarships for children in need, but also to help build a robust statewide preschool infrastructure.

Just about everyone was on board. Education leaders. Early learning advocates. Government officials who work on children’s issues. Even members of the Pence administration, including those at the Family and Social Services Administration and Pence appointees to the Early Learning Advisory Committee. For a state that has invested too little in preschool, and has paid for that negligence, this was seen as a game-changer.

Then, without a public announcement, Pence at the last minute killed the application. Even today, if you bring this up with advocates of children, a look of disbelief comes across their faces.

Some powerful voices on the far right fought support for publicly funded preschool programs, as well as improved child care regulations, and many of them have ties to the governor. When news about Pence’s decision broke, he offered an empty response centered on fears of federal government strings being attached to the money.

He could not name one such string. He could not point to one true area of concern. He could not explain why he had crushed the work of so many experts in the field without even meeting with them. He could not explain why a policy idea was killed once it got to the political office. At a time when he was still considering a campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, a governor who took heat for seeking federal money for his health-care program was nervous about being seen as taking more for a cause that divides many conservatives.

In recent weeks, in the heat of a re-election campaign, Pence’s team has tried to mitigate the damage. With polls showing strong support for preschool, Pence announced he would actually like some of that federal money. Suddenly, concerns about federal strings evaporated. Again, Pence had made a political decision.

Meanwhile, his spin doctors have been trying to sell a new answer for his 2014 decision — that he didn’t want to upset state lawmakers who had skeptically accepted the pilot program. Sorry, but you don’t get to rewrite history, or revise your answer two years later.

As you get to know Pence in the coming days, I suspect you’ll find him to be a nice guy, a skilled politician and a sometimes-gifted communicator. He is all of those things. But in Indiana, one thing is clear: He never grasped the job of being governor. He was too political and ideological for a job that requires pragmatism. His focus was on the next step up, and not the job at hand.

Every politician makes mistakes, and political survival requires an ability to sometimes make decisions that you’d rather not. But to me, Pence’s preschool grant decision went beyond that. It put politics ahead of our state’s most vulnerable children.

You can reach me at matthew.tully@Indystar.com or on Twitter: @matthewltully.