Some conservatives seem to be troubled by the significance the left is placing on the Cheney-Leahy flap. I thought I’d take a moment to put it in a slightly different context, and hopefully, help explain why this still matters a bit.
Let’s say it’s June 1996 and the Clinton-Gore campaign is gearing up for re-election. Partisan tensions are high. Gore swings by the Hill for the annual Senate photo and he runs into Sen. Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hatch has been giving Gore hell over some fundraising controversies recently, but on the Senate floor that day, Hatch approaches the VP warmly for some informal chit-chat, with a “peaches and cream” attitude, preferring to leave their political differences aside for the occasion.
Gore, still angry about previous Hatch criticisms, confronts the senator. An argument ensues. The two complain about each others’ political efforts until Gore tells Hatch, “Go f— yourself.”
Given this, what is the probable conservative reaction? I suspect, at a minimum, there’d be immediate calls for a public apology. More likely, several leading Republican lawmakers would be introducing resolutions to formally rebuke Gore, including a congressional censure.
One thing’s for certain, this would make it far worse.
“I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it,” Cheney told Neil Cavuto of Fox News. The vice president said those who heard the putdown agreed with him. “I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue.”
Indeed, let’s apply this to my little analogy. Gore tells Hatch to go f— himself and then goes on national television the next day to brag about the exchange with a notoriously liberal television personality. Instead of apologizing, Gore explains that telling Hatch to go f— himself made him feel better, which therefore makes it acceptable. After all, if there’s one thing liberals like Gore believe, it’s the basic left-wing credo: if it feels good, do it, right?
Can anyone seriously deny that this would quickly become a serious political problem for Gore and the Clinton campaign? The demands for an apology — or at least some sign of sincere regret — would be overwhelming. In an election-year environment, Republicans would be milking this constantly, even starting rumors that Gore could be dropped from the ticket for his “anger issues” and his inability to control himself in a tense situation.
After all, if Gore can’t deal with Hatch with some level of civility on the Senate floor, how could the American people trust him to deal diplomatically with world leaders? Would Gore tell off a head of state with whom he disagreed because it’d make him “feel better”?
The media would quickly start talking about Gore’s f-bomb and its ability to overshadow the administration’s message. Making things even richer, let’s say the Clinton-Gore campaign had also just released a new ad decrying Republican rage, and that the president had spent the previous four years insisting that they were going to return civility to Washington and change the tone in American politics. It isn’t a stretch to believe this would become a defining issue of the 1996 campaign.
Ultimately, I think expectations are already so low for Dick Cheney, it’s easier for him to get away with things that would have buried Gore. The truth is, everyone already recognizes Cheney as a world-class jerk. In DC, all the players — lawmakers, lobbyists, activists, reporters — expect him to be a jerk. It’s somewhat unusual for him to tell a respected senior senator to go f— himself, but yet, it’s not a terrible surprise, either.
And with these lowered expectations, Cheney’s vulgar outburst is seen as relatively insignificant.
Consider the White House’s response.
“These things happen from time to time,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan when asked what Bush’s reaction to Cheney’s remark had been. “You’re talking about one incident involving a private exchange. The president is looking ahead.”
So, if Mike McCurry had said, just two days after Gore tells Hatch to go f— himself, that Clinton is “looking ahead,” would the right be satisfied? Wouldn’t conservatives demand some kind of denunciation?
Or how about the party’s Senate leader?
“It’s a political season right now, where partisan feelings and emotions have come to the surface itself,” Bill Frist said when asked on CNN’s “Late Edition” about the comment. “With regard to the vice president’s comments, I did not hear the comments, did not witness the comments, but clearly they reflect a lot of that emotion,” he said.
Oh, now I get it. The VP should feel free to tell a respected senior senator to go f— himself if the VP is really upset about the senator’s political beliefs.
I suspect Frist is being intentionally obtuse, but doesn’t he realize that all of us have “a lot of that emotion” against our ideological foes? Under Frist’s vision, we’d all be able to share obscene outbursts against the other side whenever we really meant it, so long as it’s a “political season” and our remarks “reflect a lot of emotion.”
Just as an aside, from now on, just as the junior senator from Pennsylvania is Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, the vice president is now Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney. FYI.