Dick Cheney, the enigma

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - All but two of the vice presidents in the past 50 years have either run for president or become president when their predecessor died.

Dick Cheney, unlike almost all his recent vice-presidential predecessors, will not run for president. This allows him to sail above the normal rules of political behavior, not doing the things vice presidents do as they angle for the presidency. Cheney's accidental shooting of Harry Whittington last weekend is another example — an especially dramatic one — of his detachment from normal vice presidential protocol.

Two things defined vice presidents in the past: their powerlessness and their desire to become president.

Cheney reverses the historical pattern: he is powerful, immensely so, according to his adversaries, and he doesn’t plan to run for president.

In the past two weeks, I've gotten in my inbox four mass e-mail messages from vice presidential contenders, past, present, and future.

Each one was either a fund-raising appeal or a reminder to please not forget the sender’s political prospects:

• Former Vice President Al Gore sent one that said “George Bush is pursuing a truly breathtaking and unprecedented power grab."
• The 2000 vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, decried “an abysmal failure” by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff during Hurricane Katrina.
• John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential contender, told me that “President Bush and Vice President Cheney are in the pocket of the oil and gas industry.”
• And, potential 2008 presidential and vice presidential candidate Sen. Evan Bayh reminded me about his recent trip to Iowa, which holds its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses in January 2008.

I also got one from 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (subject line: “Evidence mounts against Cheney”), asking me to give money to his political action committee.

I have neither gotten, nor do I expect to get any e-mail solicitations from Dick Cheney — nor would I get one if I were a Republican Party activist in Iowa or New Hampshire.

Cheney remains an enigma
By Thursday the storm in Washington over Cheney’s hunting accident had faded away, leaving behind one familiar piece of political debris: six years after being elected vice president , Cheney remains an enigma, a fascination for reporters and for his adversaries.

Apart from occasional campaign fund-raising trips and a few tie-breaking Senate votes, his figurative place in American politics remains, as in 2001, that same undisclosed, secure location.

Naturally, Cheney will be a target for Democrats in the 2006 campaign, but it's not clear whether he'll be any larger a target than he would have been had he never accidentally shot Harry Whitttington.

On Wednesday the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) issued a statement drawing attention to the March 13 fund-raising appearance by Cheney on behalf of Republican congressional candidate John Gard in Wisconsin.

According to the DCCC, "Wisconsin families deserve to know why State Rep. Gard chooses to stand so close to Dick Cheney, one of the figureheads of corruption in Washington, D.C."

Asked about the political effect of Cheney's hunting accident, DCCC spokesman Bill Burton didn't directly answer, saying, "The more the American people know about Dick Cheney, the less they like what they hear. When Dick Cheney is at work at the White House, American families aren't exactly given a seat at the table." Cheney-as-corporate-crony remains, as in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the durable Democratic theme.

Over the past six years, Cheney’s foes have sometimes thought they finally had him: in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment, for his work on the energy policy task force in 2001, for his links to his former firm, Halliburton, and for that firm’s Iraq contracts, for his role in overstating the risk of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Each time the fish has eluded the hook. So, too, in the Whittington episode.

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