It seems like just a year ago that Dick Cheney had become such an embarrassment to the White House that there was widespread talk that Bush would be better off dropping the VP from the ticket. Oh wait, that was just a year ago.
And yet, here we are, three-and-a-half years before the next presidential election, and suddenly the right not only loves Cheney again, they also want him to be Bush’s successor.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in public and private, is being urged by a small but growing number of conservatives to reconsider his refusal to run for president in 2008. So far, the vice president is unmoved by the fledgling Cheney-for-president boomlet.
“I’m not running for president in ’08,” the vice president told columnist and TV host Lawrence Kudlow last week. “Four years from now, I don’t plan to be here.”
Yet Mr. Kudlow, along with fellow conservatives Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Tod Lindberg of Policy Review, have written columns this month pining for a reversal by the vice president. They say his foreign-policy credentials make him the most qualified heir to Mr. Bush’s legacy of Middle East democratization.
“He’s the logical successor,” Mr. Barnes said. “He has the experience at the highest levels of government that no one else can match. And he is the embodiment, along with President Bush himself, of the achievements of the Bush administration.”
From the outset, let me say that I really believe this has no chance of happening. Cheney would be a 67-year-old man, who’s suffered four heart attacks, with all the warmth of Darth Vader, and with the unique distinction of having been more wrong about more things than anyone in the Bush administration. Just as importantly, Cheney has already said he’s not running.
Having said that, the fact that so many high-profile conservatives even want him to run is fascinating for what it tells us about how the right’s approach to candidates may be shifting.
Starting in 2000, it seemed Republicans had embraced a new strategy in rallying behind a consensus presidential candidate: electability over qualifications. Few could reasonably make the case that George W. Bush was the most capable and competent candidate in the GOP field five years ago. It didn’t matter; Republicans wanted to win so they quickly got in line behind the guy people would most want to have a beer with.
Dems, meanwhile, have generally gone in the other direction of late. We look at the field and ask who would make the best president, not necessarily who makes the best candidate. Al Gore and John Kerry would have made excellent presidents; whether they were excellent nominees is less clear.
But those who are rallying behind Cheney and asking him to seek the nomination in ’08 are mirroring the Dem approach, not the Republicans’. As Jon Chait noted today, Barnes, Kudlow, and Lindberg aren’t “looking for an amiable front man”‘ they’re looking for “ideological reliability.”
Cheney’s supporters fear a repeat of the George H.W. Bush administration, in which, they believe, an ideologically fainthearted successor betrayed the purity of the Reagan revolution. Cheney obviously presents a low risk of ideological deviation. As Barnes delicately puts it, Cheney “helped Bush formulate” his agenda.
There’s actually something refreshing and even noble about the desire to nominate Cheney. Critics of this administration, like me, tend to believe that Bush owes a great deal of his political support to his personality. In public Bush comes off as folksy, droppin’ his g’s and fixin’ to clear brush at the old ranch. Though this persona strikes me as obviously fake, it strikes most Americans as genuine and wholesome. If he didn’t have this regular-guy image, Bush could never get away with policies uniformly tilted toward the rich and the business lobby. That’s exactly why Republicans picked Bush in the first place.
Now that Bush has won reelection, though, conservatives seem to have convinced themselves that Bush won because of — not despite — his policies. Perhaps they said it so often in the hope of creating a mandate that they came to believe it. In any case, they seem prepared to nominate a man who comes across more as an investment banker than a cowboy.
It’s completely out of character for them. Cheney’s backers use descriptions and adjectives identical to those who argued that Gore and Kerry were the best candidates available in their respective races: he’s experienced, serious, deliberate, knowledgeable, earnest, full of gravitas. Those are words used to describe presidents, not candidates.
With this in mind, I can only hope the Republicans follow along this path and “draft” Cheney. In each of the presidential races of the television era, the more likable candidate won. Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney wouldn’t stand a chance.