So close he can almost taste it

October has been one of President Donald Trump’s worst months in office -- and one of Mike Pence’s best.

[...]

In the span of two weeks, Pence salvaged a tenuous and short-term peace between Turkey and Kurdish forces, quelling an uproar in Washington after Republicans blasted Trump’s withdrawal in Syria. A week later, the vice president rebuked Beijing’s record on human rights -- in a speech long-sought by both Republicans and Democrats -- without disrupting fragile U.S.-China trade talks.

The performances suggest the White House may increasingly turn to the vice president to handle politically thorny situations as a parade of impeachment witnesses further weaken Trump’s ability to get anything done in Washington. In October, the number of Americans supporting the House inquiry grew to more than half, according to a RealClearPolitics average of public polling.

  Bloomberg

And RealClearPolitics is a right-wing organization.

Pence has also almost single-handedly led efforts to pressure House Democrats to vote for Trump’s rewrite of Nafta -- likely the only major Trump initiative that stands a chance of passing Congress before the 2020 elections. The vice president has been criss-crossing the U.S. to sell the deal -- traveling last week to key swing states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and this week to Virginia.

He’s also stumping for GOP gubernatorial candidates in Louisiana and Kentucky this week and will headline a fundraising event in Texas for Trump’s re-election campaign.

While Trump has been rage-tweeting and saying stupid shit in public.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, dismissed the notion that Pence is filling a leadership void created by the impeachment inquiry. The vice president is relentlessly deferential to his boss, known in Washington for heaping praise on Trump at public events.

[...]

“In the midst of a conversation about impeachment, the vice president is showing the hard work that is being done by this administration on behalf of the American people,” Short said.

Yeah, we know what he's doing. His name is going to come up often enough in the Ukraine scandal. He needs to keep his head down.

Being in the limelight carries risks in Trump’s White House. The president is known to grow weary of people around him who attract too much attention. And there’s also the possibility of being undercut by the commander-in-chief.

That, too.

Trump drew Pence into the inquiry during a Sept. 25 news conference, telling reporters they should ask for the vice president’s communications with Zelenskiy because the records would show their discussions were “perfect.” Pence, who met with Zelenskiy on Sept. 1 in Warsaw, has said he doesn’t object to releasing accounts of his communications.

William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, testified last week that Zelenskiy had asked Pence directly about about security assistance that had been frozen during their Warsaw meeting. Pence didn’t answer definitively but said that Trump wanted European countries to do more to support Ukraine and for Kyiv to more aggressively probe corruption, according to Taylor. Pence has denied raising the topic of Biden with Ukraine’s leader.

Unlike Trump, Pence is a politician, and he may have been smart enough to be very careful what he said.

NBC News reported earlier on Tuesday that some of Trump’s allies are concerned that records of Pence’s communications with Zelenskiy could make the president’s own interactions with the Ukrainian leader look even worse.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

On Thursday in his China speech, Pence went further than the president has in criticizing Beijing’s human rights record, including its intervention to end protests in Hong Kong -- an attempt to “curtail the rights and liberties of its people,” the vice president said. China’s leaders fired back, criticizing what they called Pence’s “arrogance.”

Trump called Pence’s China speech “fine” four times when asked about it on Friday, stopping short of a full-throated endorsement.

“I’m also working very closely with China on a deal, but his speech was fine,” Trump said.

[...]

The president said he reviewed the speech with Pence before the vice president delivered it and Short said the two men are “in frequent communication” over messaging. The China speech was “no different,” he said.

Yeah, Pence is going to get thrown under the bus right after Mulvaney and just before Rudy.