Vice President Mike Pence told a group of Missourians on Wednesday to spread the word about the Trump administration among their townsfolk.
“Let your voice be heard. Talk to your neighbor over a backyard fence, stop somebody at the grocery store, get online, on Facebook, send an email to a friend,” he said in the St. Louis suburb of Fenton. “Just send ’em a note and say, ‘I ran into Mike the other day. They’re doing exactly what they said they were going to do, and I believe it works, and we need to support this president and this administration. That’s what you’ve got to tell them.”
The plausibility of high-fiving a rando at the deli counter over Trump’s executive orders aside, Pence has consistently provided a stark, and perhaps helpful, counterweight to the president’s method of messaging. He’s long favored interpersonal, soft-spoken appeal to his boss’s blunt-force Twitter habit, as he noted during the campaign in August:
Pence’s style, given his utterly Midwestern manner, is authentic. But it’s also shrewd, even if not by design. It is all but certain that the near entirety of Fenton, Missouri’s four thousand residents will not tweet a single observation about Pence’s speech Wednesday, because it is all but certain that Fenton is a mostly Twitter-free zone. Journalists tweet to each other about politics. Political junkies in different ZIP codes do. Fentonites, or my hometown Madisonians in southern Indiana, or people in other communities outside major population centers, do not.
This makes Pence an asset to the administration for communicating its priorities to the majority of Americans who are not signed up for the social media du jour. Sure, such people see the president’s tweets on the news, or read about them in the paper. That doesn’t mean Twitter is relevant to the daily lives of most news consumers, beyond what they watch or read about what a newsmaker tweeted. For as prominent as the president made the utility to the political process and the individuals who cover it, there exists a populous world outside of it inhabited by most voters. Pence hails from that world, understands those who live there, and knows how they talk to each other, even in 2017.
