It’s hard for me to even imagine the possibility that Bush would dump Cheney from the GOP ticket. Not only has Bush relied on his vice president, whom he has nicknamed “Vice,” to effectively run his administration, but a change of this magnitude on the ticket would suggest that the White House was in full “panic mode” over the president’s political future.
Don’t get me wrong; Cheney certainly deserves to be fired. For a man whose seriousness and experience was supposed to bring reliability to the Bush administration, Cheney has been at the heart of one serious screw-up after another.
* It was Cheney’s ultra-secretive Energy Policy Task Force that has led to a Supreme Court case and years of controversy.
* Cheney was the administration’s most aggressive cheerleader on Iraqi WMD and virtually all of his public statements on the issue have proven to be false.
* Halliburton, of which Cheney was CEO, has been a weight around the president’s neck, especially when we learned that Cheney’s been receiving delayed compensation from the company as it wins no-bid contracts in Iraq.
* And, as Josh Marshall explained over a year ago, it was Cheney who rejected the anti-terrorism proposals of the Hart-Rudman Commission in the spring of 2001 — which largely predicted a 9/11-style attack and made recommendations on how to prevent it — opting instead for his own terrorism task force, which did literally no work for four months, right up until 3,000 Americans were killed.
And that’s just a small sampling. With a record like this, one might wonder how Cheney could keep his job. Nevertheless, as the rumors about dumping Cheney from the ticket heat up, I find the very possibility of such an occurrence implausible.
That said, there sure are a lot of rumors floating around.
U.S. News and World Report noted today that Cheney’s “political problems have folks in Tennessee gabbing about rumors that their own Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, would be tagged to take the veep’s job if the former Halliburton exec had to step aside.”
This week’s edition of Time reported that Cheney “now seems to amplify the President’s liabilities.”
Two weeks ago, MSNBC’s gossip column reported that “a well-placed source says that the president will ‘most likely’ drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and his first choice for a replacement is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“The issue of Cheney’s health will probably be given as the reason,” the insider told MSNBC. “There’s a short list of possible replacements, and Rudy is at the top of the list.”
In fact, the drop-Cheney-for-Giuliani rumor has received plenty of attention (and makes Ezra Klein very nervous), but I don’t believe it. No matter how desperate Karl Rove & Co. get, today’s Republican Party will simply not allow George W. Bush to pick a running mate who is pro-choice and pro-gay rights. Remember the fuss we heard in 2000 when the religious right heard Bush was considering Tom Ridge, a pro-choice Catholic, for the ticket? Imagine that times 100 for Giuliani.
Indeed, the White House seems to be going out of its way, particularly in the State of the Union, to make the far right as happy as possible, giving the religious right almost everything it wants. To tap Giuliani for the ticket would invite a massive revolt and probably boost Roy Moore’s ridiculous candidacy.
Moreover, with Cheney already indicating that he has no presidential aspirations of his own, Bush would effectively be selecting the frontrunner of the 2008 GOP nomination if he chose a new running mate. The competition would be fierce and there are far safer choices than Giuliani.
These rumors, I suspect, will likely prove baseless and I don’t imagine Cheney is going anywhere. And in the off-chance Cheney is pushed aside, Rudy Giuliani is one of the last people I’d expect to see get the nod.