I’ll be brief here — because even when I willingly eat some crow I like to keep the portions small — but it must be acknowledged that Mike Pence’s presidential campaign rollout has surprised me, in a positive way. It may not necessarily be of the greatest comfort to his partisans for me to say this, because I still believe his campaign to be ultimately futile. But he is off to a dignified start, and perhaps something more: something politically brave.

That is because Pence has come directly out of the gate by addressing the matter that all other candidates want to avoid but that he cannot: Trump’s conduct after the November 2020 election and the disgrace of January 6. In his Iowa rollout speech, he declared Trump unworthy of the job: “I believe anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. And I believe anyone who asks others to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.” This morning, his super PAC “Committed To America” followed thereon with a video whose slugline couldn’t be clearer: “A weak man appeases a mob. A man of courage and character stands up to them.” The attack on Trump is blunt and continues from there — how he has gone on embarrassing himself since — along lines intended to speak to traditional conservatives.

I am deeply split about this issue, because as I have said many times already, you cannot win the Republican nomination for president in 2024 by revisiting the flaming wreckage of January 6, 2021. The voters have no appetite for it; they will perhaps tolerate an acknowledgment of it (this is strictly TBD, incidentally) but have no time to spend relitigating it. I have also pointed out that the one candidate who is most trapped by this dilemma is former vice president Mike Pence, for reasons that should be obvious enough to any readers who weren’t born 20 minutes ago but are also explained here.

So when I listen to Pence speak, and see the way he has launched his campaign, something deep within my conservative heartstrings (formed in the wake of the 1994 Republican Revolution) is inevitably plucked. He’s running on solid conservative values, supports America’s role in the world abroad, and seems like a decent man on a gut level. Sadly, however, he feels like a man out of time, beaming his campaign in from an era whose political aesthetic that has long since passed us by. That is why I remain so pessimistic about it. And yet simultaneously, that is also why I cannot help but respect the way he has grasped the nettle directly, linking his candidacy explicitly to the contrast he provided to Trump as his vice president on that pathetic January day. There is something of a Shakespearean quality to Pence’s candidacy, in the way he must confront the manifest failures of the man who elevated him. If he is willing to do that, he should earn everyone’s respect. The time is out of joint; O cursèd spite, that ever he was born to set it right!