Click above or here to view Mike Pence’s most memorable and mocked campaign video.

Of course anybody who has ever pumped their own gas can see that if you look closely Pence isn’t even holding the lever used to pump the gas:

Twitter went wild with lots of snarky comments like these (click them to enlarge):

Like millions of Americans over the age of 16 (and perhaps younger) I’ve pumped a lot of gas. Years ago my late wife and I farmed cranberry bogs and had both a car and a red pickup truck, the later to use on the farm, so I had a lot of experience filling a red pickup with gas. Perhaps that makes me something of an expert on evaluating Pence’s video where he pretend to pump gas into a red pickup.

No doubt because so many people had pumped gas at self-serve stations when Pence made his campaign video he was widely mocked.

In August we had articles like “Mike Pence Pretends to Fill Pickup Truck With Gas in New Campaign Video.”

Excerpt:

While Pence held the nozzle to his truck for almost a minute, it became immediately apparent that the former vice president was not actually filling up the vehicle.

Throughout the video, the gas pump could be heard beeping, as if to prompt Pence to select a grade. More crucially, he could be seen holding the handle without even squeezing the trigger.

Social media users were quick to pick up on the performance and ridicule Pence.

Here’s another article: Mike Pence is getting ridiculed online for a campaign video where he pretends to pump gas into his pickup truck for a full minute.

Pickup trucks are considered even more American than apple pie. I don’t think Pence ever owned a pick-up truck. It seems that if he had he would have made this known.

The tone-deaf decision to try to combine a pickup truck when nobody was going to believe he actually ever drove one (I base this on thinking that if he had he would have made this public) instead of a car to his message about gas prices was most likely based on trying to tap into the imagery of the American pickup truck. Pickups are certainly used for their utility but the majority of people who buy them don’t really need them (read “Most Truck Owners Probably Don’t Need a Full-Size Pickup”)

Pickup trucks festooned with Trump flags have become ubiquitous. I have my doubts that the majority of people who own these trucks actually need them for work or use them for off-road driving (for example, lower right below).

Click above to enlarge image.

I have to give credit to Pence for not even trying to organize a Pickups for Pence Parade despite that it makes for a neat name perhaps because his supporters probably couldn’t put together something like this (see article here).

I remember when Scott Brown ran for Senate from Massachusetts. Many of his ads showed him driving his pickup truck to campaign events.

Excerpt from above article:

The limousine classes forget, at their peril, that most Americans really care about their cars. And they really, really care about their trucks. How else to explain, pardon the pun, all the traction Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown got when he started going around saying things like, “I’m Scott Brown and I drive a truck”? The truck in question, a 2005 GMC Canyon pickup, with a purported 200,000 miles on its odometer, evidently registered deeply with voters, and featured prominently in Brown’s stump speeches and advertising, telegraphing the empathy the former nude Cosmo model-turned-lawyer-turned-state senator and owner of five properties, felt for the working classes, a sentiment presumably shared by his TV reporter wife, his basketball-playing chanteuse of a single daughter and her less available sister.

We can only assume that it was the Canyon’s high mileage that choked up the Massachusetts electorate, as the model Brown rolls in was in fact GM’s wimpiest truck for 2005, a crude and small pickup of negligible technical merit and minor utility, outclassed by almost anything else with a bed. Of its nearly identical Chevrolet twin, the Colorado, some truck guys we know say, “Like a Pebble,” making a play on the Bob Seger chestnut sung for Chevrolet for what seemed like forever. Fortunately for Brown, his opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, not only ran a lousy campaign by all accounts, she also drove a Nissan XTerra. Neither American-made nor a truck, it’s a small SUV, with decent moves off the paved highway. With the weight of the impending doom of national health care thrust upon her, the sooner the XTerra gets Coakley off-road, the happier she may be.

Whether his pickup truck drove Brown to winning his Senate seat is impossible to determine but it couldn’t have hurt this Republican who in 2010 beat a popular and well-known Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a special election which occurred after the 2009 death of longtime Senator Ted Kennedy.

Nobody questioned whether he really drove his truck or pumped his own gas.

Pence has been in the news yesterday because he’s dropped out of the GOP primary. His website explains why here.

With the ascension to the House speakership of religious zealot Mike Johnson there have been comparisons of his beliefs to those of Mike Pence and it has been noted that he referenced the Bible and prayer online (below) and in his statement where he said “after much prayer and deliberation” before he announced his decision.

Click above to enlarge

As an aside, it should be noted that even though he’s withdrawn from the race his website as of this writing is still soliciting donations on the same page announcing his withdrawal:

I assume that his website designer peeps didn’t get the message or that Pence is being Trump-like in trying to grift more money even though he isn’t running anymore.

Read my previous Stressline bogs here.