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Fold, Spindle, Mutilate[Previous entry: "Friday Night Surprise: White House Aide Caught In Shoplifting Scheme"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Assessing Iraq"] 03/10/2006:"VEEP DOO-DOO"
by Hendrik Hertzberg According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the “favorability” rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the “Daily Show” star’s going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” When King barked out the number—“Cheney eighteen per cent”—Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum. The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner. That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President’s lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially. Now that the Armstrong incident has receded into the mists of time, where it can be calmly considered in historical perspective, the shotgunning of Harry Whittington, in itself, does indeed appear as of less than global significance. To be sure, certain details of the original competing narratives turn out to have been slightly askew, adding up to a political wash. “Cheney shot an old man in the face,” for example. Yes, Whittington is full of years—seventy-eight of them—but the suggestion of decrepitude is misleading; he is a still-practicing (and public-spirited) lawyer in robust health. And he was shot not only in the face but also, we now know, in the chest. (He had a heart attack the way Nancy Kerrigan had a knee attack.) If the shooting was no big deal, its aftermath may nevertheless be said to have shed light on that favorite of Republicans, the character issue. No doubt it is an ignorant urban prejudice to suggest that there is something distasteful about taking pleasure in killing or maiming dozens of inoffending, pen-raised birds whose only taste of freedom comes in the last few moments of their lives, as Cheney has done in the past. But his post-shooting behavior at the ranch—failing to report the incident promptly to the public (and, in detail, to the police), opting for the cocktail shaker and the dinner table instead of accompanying his friend to the hospital, dispatching surrogates to blame the shootee—did not enhance his reputation for decency. In the previous CBS News poll, taken pre-shooting, in January, Cheney’s favorability rating was twenty-three per cent—a truer measure of what might be called his underlying unpopularity. Cheney is Bush without the charm, the religiosity, the Michael Gerson speech texts, and the Presidential sheen. What he personifies, above all, is the raw reality of Bush’s signature policies, all of which he has had a strong hand in creating. There are the giant tax cuts for the rich, especially the very rich. (“We won the midterms,” Cheney told Bush’s economic team, according to the journalist Ron Suskind, when another such cut was on the table, after the 2002 congressional elections. “This is our due.”) There is the related, and enormous, budget deficit, which will necessitate another $800-billion rise in the debt limit by the middle of this month if the government is to avoid defaulting on its obligations. (“Deficits don’t matter,” Cheney once explained.) There is the strategically and morally disastrous misconduct of the “war on terror,” including authorized torture, defiantly unlawful domestic surveillance, and habitual, self-defeating contempt for allied opinion and international instruments. There is the toxic combination of reflexive secrecy and the political use of secrets, as in the Scooter Libby affair. There is, in place of an energy policy, obeisance to the oil industry—and thus to the petrocracy of the Middle East. (Conservation, according to Cheney, is “a personal virtue.”) Above all, there is the terrible war in Iraq, undertaken on the basis of faulty, willfully distorted, sometimes falsified intelligence and now about to enter its fourth year, with no end in sight to the bloodshed and chaos. (“I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency,” Cheney said last June.) Against this background, the figure of twenty-three per cent is not shockingly low. It’s shockingly high. Quoting “senior G.O.P. sources,” Insight, an obscure but well-connected Washington “news magazine,” asserted last week that Cheney will “probably” be eased into retirement after November’s congressional elections. That seems far-fetched. Bush, who has pushed his biological father beyond the periphery of his official circle, is unlikely to do the same to the substitute he acquired when Cheney, entrusted with the task of finding George W. Bush a running mate, found himself. “There is a higher father that I appeal to,” Bush famously told Bob Woodward three years ago. He wasn’t talking about Cheney, but he might as well have been. George W. Bush is far more deferential to Cheney (draft evader, Yale dropout, and tough-guy conservative) than to George H. W. Bush (war hero, Yale Phi Beta Kappa, and kinder, gentler moderate). If, come next year, Cheney really does resign his office “for reasons of health,” he will have done so, almost certainly, for reasons of health. Issue of 2006-03-13 Posted 2006-03-06  Replies: 36 Comments I check with other people trying to get the RSS feed to work for this site, and I get mixed results from it's you, to it's your browser. Can anyone confirm the problem? Shycon said @ 05/31/2006 06:18 PM EDT I can't seem to get my RSS feed for this blog to work. Is it me or the site? 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