Mike Pence pulled the plug on his presidential campaign.

John Krull mug
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

The former vice president to Donald Trump and onetime Indiana governor had little choice but to leave the race for the White House. His fundraising had dried up. His standing in the polls, even in those states where he campaigned hard, remained small, even diminutive.

There was a decent chance that Pence wouldn’t even have qualified for the next Republican presidential debate, a fresh humiliation to be visited on a man who had known so many of them in his political career.

So, he quit.

That must have been hard.

He has wanted to be and worked to be president for so long—some sources say since high school, some say even before—that giving up after coming so close must have been painful.

I feel for him.

Even though Mike Pence and I disagree on many, many things, I always have liked the guy.

I know there are people reading this who think this isn’t—or shouldn’t be—possible. They believe that disagreements about politics or public policy make it impossible for people to like or respect each other.

That’s not the way it works for me.

Never has been and, I hope, never will.

What I have liked about Mike Pence is his courtesy. He knows that I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues—many of them big ones, several of great importance to him—but he’s never been anything other than polite and respectful in our interactions.

When he raised a point of contention between us, he always did so in a way that made discussion possible. He could listen as well as talk.

He also had the capacity to admire those with whom he did not agree. I remember once moderating an event in which he talked following a speech by the late former U.S. Rep. Andy Jacobs, D-Indiana.

Pence devoted the opening of his own address to paying tribute to Jacobs’ character and the contributions he had made to Indiana and the United States.

Pence didn’t do that because he thought he could persuade some of Jacobs’ supporters to vote for him. Pence was savvy enough to know that wouldn’t happen.

He did it because he liked and admired Andy Jacobs—and wanted to say so publicly.

There were times as he climbed the political ladder that Pence seemed to lose touch with that side of himself. He seemed to forget that his inherent likability was his greatest asset.

Maybe that’s because the time in which he rose to power became more and more partisan.

More and more bitter.

More and more angry.

This was particularly true on the right, which craved standard-bearers who find it easier to snarl than smile. Conservatives’ hunger for—and devotion to—happy warriors seemed to die with Ronald Reagan.

That left Pence in a quandary. He is not by nature an angry man.

When he tried to be, he never could sell the idea that he was seething with barely contained resentments. He never could make either friends or foes believe his rage was something to fear.

Worse, his attempts to move in the conservative cauldron of constant grievance made him seem disingenuous and inauthentic in an age that attracted to screaming incompetence, so long as it was genuinely practiced.

Enter Donald Trump.

I doubt Pence ever realized that signing on as Trump’s running mate doomed whatever chance he had of making it to the Oval Office himself. Pence cleansed and blessed Trump’s bid with the religious right, which gave Trump the narrow margin needed to secure the presidency.

In doing so, Pence traded away his own base—evangelicals now prefer the philandering former president to the devout former vice president—without gaining any footing with Trump’s followers.

Worse, Pence spent four years abasing himself doing it, supplicating before a man he had to have known was neither a good president nor a good man.

A guy who could recognize and appreciate, as Pence did, the integrity of Andy Jacobs also would know when that integrity wasn’t present.

Now, after all the sacrifices, self-denial and self-discipline, Mike Pence’s dream has come crashing down.

There are those who take glee in his failure.

I’m not among them.

I didn’t want him to be president, but I can’t take satisfaction from a decent guy’s disappointment.

And he is a decent guy.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.