WASHINGTON - Now that Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry has chosen Senator
John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate, the
US capital's attention has shifted to the fate of Vice
President Dick Cheney.
While Cheney's vast
Washington and national-security experience compares
very well with Edwards' mere five years in the US
Senate, the latter's unfailingly sunny and optimistic
demeanor - not to mention his Clintonesque skill, finely
honed over two decades as a trial lawyer, at
"connecting" with his intended audience - will make it
very difficult for the dour incumbent to prevail in any
face-to-face debate.
Cheney's growing image as a
"grumpy old man" - greatly enhanced in recent weeks by
his stubborn insistence that there was a real
relationship between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and
the al-Qaeda terrorist group and his well-publicized "Go
f*** yourself" exchange with a prominent Democrat on the
floor of the Senate - has provoked some veteran
Republicans to suggest publicly that it may be time for
Cheney to go.
The stakes are enormous if only
because the suggested replacements - including Arizona
Senator John McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
and even National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
Secretary of State Colin Powell - are either far more
politically moderate or lack the bureaucratic and
political experience that has given Cheney more power to
influence or even determine policy than any other vice
president in the past century.
Indeed, many
foreign-policy analysts believe that, were it not for
Cheney, whose own mainly neo-conservative
national-security staff rivaled the president's National
Security Council (NSC) staff in clout and effectiveness,
Washington would not have gone to war in Iraq so soon,
if at all.
Cheney, whose famous phrase is "We
don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it," has also been
blamed for vetoing any serious engagement with North
Korea to determine whether a deal could be worked out
whereby the Asian state would dismantle its
nuclear-weapons program in exchange for aid and other
carrots.
Although the neo-conservatives have
seen their influence steadily decline since late last
year, Cheney's absence in a second term with President
George W Bush would make it far more difficult for them
to stage a comeback. Indeed, this was precisely the
motive behind a discreet effort launched late last year
by some cronies of former president George H W Bush
(1989-93) - the current leader's father - including
Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, to persuade the younger
Bush to dump Cheney.
But given his failure so
far to fire anyone responsible for the postwar debacle
in Iraq, most analysts believe the president will not
force Cheney off the ticket, particularly because it
would risk alienating much of his core constituency,
especially the Christian Right and aggressive
nationalists. If even small numbers of these groups stay
home on election day, November 2, Bush's chances of
winning re-election would be significantly eroded.
As a result, much of the public discussion about
Cheney's stepping down is now directed at the vice
president and his loyalists. The most widely noted to
date came in the form of an open letter in the USA Today
newspaper by James Gannon, editor of the Des Moines
Register, the biggest newspaper in Iowa, one of nine
critical "swing" states where Kerry and Bush are running
neck and neck.
"Nobody knows better than you do
that you have become a lightning rod for criticism, and
a favorite target for your party's political opponents,"
wrote Gannon, who called himself a "longtime admirer"
who had reported on Cheney when he served as former
president Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff 30
years ago.
"Fair or not, it is simply too easy
to paint Dick Cheney as a tool of the oil industry, a
too-eager advocate of war in Iraq and a too-gullible
supporter of the now-disgraced Ahmad Chalabi, who fed
the Bush administration false intelligence on Iraq. Your
former company, Halliburton, is a political albatross
around your neck, weighing down not only you but also
President Bush," Gannon wrote.
"You must ask
yourself now if your continued presence by his side will
offer strength or weakness to the Republican ticket in
November, and what it will mean for [Republican]
prospects in the future," he noted, suggesting McCain
and Washington's new United Nations ambassador, John
Danforth, as possible substitutes.
Indeed, the
poll numbers are particularly unfavorable to Cheney.
According to one recent survey by the Wall Street
Journal, only 17% of citizens have a "very positive
view" of him, compared with 27% whose assessment is
"very negative".
In a Washington Post poll last
month, 22% of respondents rated him favorably, while 31%
gave him an unfavorable rating. Overall, Cheney's
favorability lags 10-15 points behind Bush's, which, at
around 45%, is already below the 50% level that
presidents have historically needed to get re-elected at
this stage of the campaign.
Worse, among
self-described Republicans, Cheney's approval rating was
only 48% in the Post poll, 30 points behind Bush's.
In fact, almost all of the recent news for
Cheney has been bad. Not only are Halliburton, which he
headed from 1995-2000, and its no-bid contracts in Iraq
weathering poorly under congressional and media
scrutiny, but word that the vice president might be
called as a witness in a major bribery probe in Paris
into the company's operations in Nigeria when he was
chief executive officer is adding to Republican
nervousness.
So are the yet-to-be-announced
findings of a special prosecutor, who has questioned two
top Cheney officials and the vice president about the
unauthorized media disclosure of the identity of a
covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in connection
with controversial allegations surrounding Saddam's
alleged attempts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger.
But it is Cheney's recent behavior that has
fueled worries about keeping him on the ticket. After
the bipartisan commission investigating the September
11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon declared
last month it had found "no credible evidence" of a
collaborative relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda,
Cheney declared he had "overwhelming evidence" of such a
connection that the commission "probably" had not seen.
After the vice president repeatedly ignored
public appeals by the Democratic and Republican
co-chairs of the commission to turn over any such
information, they released a formal statement on Tuesday
that was clearly intended to embarrass him. "After
examining available transcripts of the vice president's
public remarks, the 9-11 Commission believes it has
access to the same information the vice president has
seen regarding contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq prior
to the [September 11] attacks," it said.
That
the commission's Republican co-chair, former New Jersey
governor Thomas Kean, is closely tied to the elder Bush
added to speculation that the move to dump Cheney
remains very much alive.
Shortly after the
commission made its initial announcement, Cheney invited
CNBC reporter Gloria Borger to interview him in what
looked like a windowless bunker about his views on its
findings. When she asked whether he still believed that
a report - debunked by the commission - that the leader
of the September 11 hijackers had met with a senior
Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before
the attack was "pretty well confirmed", Cheney
interrupted her twice, insisting, "No, I never said
that."
But a trip to the archives found an
interview given by Cheney to NBC in December 2001 in
which he said the Prague report has "been pretty well
confirmed". The relevant excerpts from the two
interviews became a staple of the Comedy Channel's
wildly popular The Daily Show and were featured
in newspapers around the country.
It was just a
few days later that Senator Patrick Leahy, chatting with
Republican colleagues on the Senate floor during a photo
session, saw Cheney and stuck out his hand. Cheney
refused to reciprocate, complaining about Democratic
efforts to tie Halliburton's contracts in Iraq to him.
When Leahy replied that he did not appreciate Republican
efforts to question his Catholicism because he opposed a
right-wing nominee for a federal judge, Cheney uttered
the most famous epithet of the campaign so far and
walked away. "I felt better afterwards," he told Fox
News.
