Article published July 18, 2007
Vice president hurts GOP's chance to retain White House
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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THE DECISION of President Bush to keep Dick Cheney on as his vice presidential running mate in 2004 may have been the worst thing he has done to America.
I say this not on the basis of whatever policy impact Mr. Cheney may have had on the Bush Administration - the Iraq war, torture, obsessive secrecy, plumping up the executive branch, or whatever. The problem is the phenomenon of having in the vice presidency a person who will not be running for president in the next election. (Mr. Cheney cannot and never could have run on the basis of his heart illness.)
If, for example, Mr. Cheney were going to be running for president in 2008, during Mr. Bush's second term, and particularly toward the end of it, he would be working within the administration to make its positions on issues more palatable to the American people and, therefore, more likely to improve his prospects with the electorate in upcoming elections.
For example, it is now perfectly obvious that the American people have had enough of the casualties, the financial cost, and the bludgeoning the Iraq war is giving America's image in the world. If Mr. Cheney were running in 2008, he would be saying to Mr. Bush and others within the administration: "Look, you bunch of bozos, you are going to have to figure out how to get us out of this mess or I and the Republican Party with me are going to be toast in next year's elections."
Instead, Mr. Bush and the rest of his and Mr. Cheney's loyalists are continuing to hardline it with the same lies and fear-mongering they used to get us into the war in the first place. More practical Republican candidates whose seats will be at risk in 2008 are either jumping ship or drinking.
The model for how a vice president would behave if he were running for president in the bad days of an unpopular war was presented by President Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, in 1968 as the Vietnam war was going south. Mr. Humphrey squirmed desperately, trying to remain loyal to the president while differentiating himself from Mr. Johnson and what was seen as Mr. Johnson's war. It didn't work, of course, and Richard Nixon was elected, but at least Mr. Humphrey visibly tried.One result of Mr. Cheney having hogged the role of crown prince in 2004 (or, depending on one's interpretation of what went on in the underground caves of the White House at that point, Mr. Bush's having felt he could not dispense with Mr. Cheney for a second term), is that the Republican Party is now in total disarray in terms of settling on a presidential candidate.
There is no obvious GOP candidate-in-waiting with bona fide White House experience to put forward, someone who might have a decent prospect of winning in 2008, despite the Iraq war. Instead, they have a large collection of flawed, unconvincing characters, three of whom don't believe in evolution, as well as an actor-turned-senator-turned-actor who has yet to declare himself as their great white hope.
To make America's situation even worse for 2008, the absence of an obviously viable candidate on the Republican side - a gift to us from Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush - has had the almost inevitable result of creating disarray on the Democratic side as well. With no opponent to focus on and the (quite possibly false) impression that the race is theirs for the taking, every Democrat who can read and write considers himself a possible candidate, leaving the electorate with a broad field of candidates, all of them flawed, none of them an obvious standout.
Note that the focus at the moment is not on the relative quality of the Democratic or Republican candidates' positions on issues, but rather on how much money each has been able to scoop up from donors so far or - in the case of Mitt Romney - from his own pockets.
If there was a clear Republican candidate sitting in the vice president's office, the Democrats would feel compelled to get their act together, settle on someone with decent prospects to be elected, and put together a platform that included the big issues and made sense. So, thank you again Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for - at least at this point - having messed up the 2008 presidential race and, unless the country is able to pull itself out of its electoral tail-spin, messing up the next four years as well.
It is now almost certainly too late for what I thought might have been the Republican strategy for dealing with the Cheney noncandidacy.
I thought that by now the White House would have decided that the strains of the job on his health were too much for Mr. Cheney to continue as vice president, that he would then have stepped down for valid health reasons, and the Republicans would have plugged into the position a viable 2008 presidential candidate.
I can think of several reasons why they didn't do that (I will give them credit for enough intelligence to at least realize they had a problem). First, Mr. Bush felt he couldn't live without Mr. Cheney around. Second - and I suspect this is probably the truth of the matter - Mr. Cheney didn't want to step down and Mr. Bush decided in the end that he didn't care what happened to the Republican Party after he was out of the White House.
There is also the late-at-night, eerie concern that Mr. Bush has in his head some sort of scenario where, for reasons of national security - real or drummed up - the 2008 elections will have to be postponed and he will get to stay on.
My suspicions have at their base the feeling I have that, given their operating style now, this bunch will not leave the White House easily in 2009.
All one can do at this point is continue to have faith that the American electoral system will somehow manage to provide us with a decent candidate or two. But by their bad decision in 2004, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have made it much more difficult for that system to function as it is supposed to.
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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