Dick Cheney, the enigma

Resignation rumors
Nonetheless, rumors periodically sweep the Capitol that Cheney is about to resign. I’ve heard such rumors for at least 18 months. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan was the latest to speculate about a Cheney resignation in her Wall Street Journal column Thursday morning.

Cheney, so different from previous vice presidents in almost every way, does call to mind one of his predecessors, Nelson Rockefeller. (Along with Rockefeller, whom President Gerald Ford jettisoned from his ticket in 1976, the only other veep of the past 50 years to not run for president or become president was Spiro Agnew, who was forced to quit in 1973.)

One of the indelible news photos of the 1970s was Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers at a 1976 campaign rally in Binghamton, N.Y. Cheney sometimes seems to do likewise to his adversaries, especially those in the news media.

“I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them — they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times,” he told Brit Hume of Fox News in his interview Wednesday on how the Whittington accident became public.

Back in the days when the number-two man was little noticed, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Thomas Marshall, said the vice president is like “a man in a cataleptic state; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.”

Contrary to Marshall’s dictum, Cheney speaks and moves and plays a central role in administration policy making, yet he acts mostly behind closed doors, making him the supreme oddity in this news media-saturated age.

One moment of accountability
He has had only one moment of accountability: the 2004 election. His one notable performance in that campaign was his debate with vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards. The Democrat kept bringing up Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and American casualties in Iraq.

Cheney remained unrepentant: “What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the right — same course of action. The world is far safer today because Saddam Hussein is in jail.”

Cheney also proved to be a sharp-toothed attack dog, turning to Edwards and berating him and Kerry for voting against $87 billion in funding for Iraq war operations, a vote Cheney attributed to fears of Howard Dean’s growing strength in the party in 2003.

Kerry and Edwards “decided they would cast an anti-war vote, and they voted against the troops. Now, if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to al Qaida?”

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