Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is the friend of all and enemy to none in the conservative movement and the broader GOP. He is smart, experienced and — crucial in this cycle — affable and amiable, the two descriptors least used in 2016 and most needed in the country right now.

Pence served a dozen years in Congress, and I got to know him on the radio and then at a House GOP retreat he organized in Baltimore as 2010 opened, a retreat at which Pence dueled a bit with President Obama. The Indiana governor spent a lot of years as a gifted radio talk show host before entering the House, so he knows my world, and he’s almost a Buckeye — his congressional district ran along his state’s border with God’s country — and every bit the Midwesterner of standard American issue.