<The password is “incompetence.”>
This is just sad. The obvious reason it’s sad is that Mike Pence has as much chance of being nominated for President, never mind elected, as I do. His campaign is delusional: he has neither the ability and character to be President nor the presence and popularity required to make him one.
This campaign video only reinforces these unavoidable realities. It’s incompetent, for the reason cited by the the witter wag, but other reasons as well. I can forgive Pence for not picking up on the fact that his staged actions look fake, but not the director and crew. Not is Pence’s staff blameless. How many people were involved in this production—and yet not one pointed out that before you pump gas, you need to choose which grade?
If Pence can’t assemble a competent campaign staff, a competent Cabinet and group of advisors are probably beyond his skill level as well.
Ethics Alarms 
Forgetting what I personally think of Pence (which isn’t much), this is probably the tenth take for him to get it right and sound even remotely personable, so the gas tank was likely already full to the brim and if he had chose one of the gasoline grades and pulled up on the pump lever (which he didn’t do) it would be shutting off automatically. Probably wasn’t even his truck.
Another political false facade.
Could this be similar to never saying goodbye on the phone in movies?
Yes, except that few people notice that (it drives me crazy) and it doesn’t matter if people think fictional characters are rude and don’t know telephone manners.
Stop making me defend Mike Pence. Assuming the clip above is the whole ad, there’s nothing wrong with it. He stuck the nozzle in the fill pipe and talks to the camera. The idea that he forgot to select the grade or forgot to pull the pump lever is wrong. Presumably, when he’s done talking, he’ll elect the grade and pull the pump lever.
Besides, it’s an ad. How many takes; and see Steve’s comment for other issues in making an ad.
There’re enough issues with Pence’s apparently doomed run that there’s no need to pile on with weak criticism of an ad.
I’m a director. That ad had a director. It’s the director’s job to consider and understand how an audience will respond to what he or she is directing. Admittedly my household is super-sensitive to such continuity issues because my wife notices every goof and glitch in every movie or TV show she watches. But in a campaign ad, you just can’t allow stuff like this. It doesn’t matter if someone can explain how it might make sense. Everyone pumps gas every week. They know the drill. I assume Pence does. You get one chance to make a first impression. There were explanations for why GW Bush seemed to be amazed at a supermarket check-out system too, but he still looked like a doofus. It’s the staff’s job to make sure their charge doesn’t look like a doofus, and it’s the doofus’s job to know how to hire people that won’t let the secret get out.
If this was the tenth take, any competent director surely would have been annoyed by the machine beeping by the second take, literally saying “pick one!”
I stopped listening to his dialog when he gave the percentage increase, and started wondering why they didn’t ask for the pump’s power to be cut for filming.
Exactly. This made people playing chess with the board set up wrong—my least favorite example of negligent film-making—look trivial.