Cheney’s World Apart

All of us have the defects of our qualities. The same is true of the Vice President. When George W. Bush tapped Richard Cheney in 2000 to be his vice presidential running mate, his great virtue was that he was perceived to have no further political ambition. It was probably not entirely that simple; Cheney had run for president once, but he neither enjoyed the game nor was very good at the gladhanding required. But it quickly became clear that Cheney was an inside guy, not someone to lead a parade. And that was what Bush wanted and needed anyway.

Which is why this weekend's turn of events are so ironic and so revealing. By this time in a two-term presidential run, the vice president is normally running full-tilt for president himself, especially on weekends. By now, a veep is routinely raising eyebrows for finding reasons to be in key fundraising cities on Saturday nights. The last two-second term veeps, Al Gore and George Herbert Walker Bush, would never have wasted a weekend in rural Texas; they would have spent it in Iowa or New Hampshire or hopscotching somewhere else, collecting chits in key states on the 1988 or 2000 primary calendars.

But not Cheney. He's not running. He has no plans to run. Which means he doesn't have to make all the silly stops that Gore or Bush 41 had to make. But it also means he doesn't have to put his ear to the ground. He doesn't have to pay any attention to the polls. He doesn't have to surround himself with political advisors who worry about his every move. And the problem with that isn't that he spends a lot of time hunting or fishing or reading intelligence reports (or whatever it is Cheney does—most of that is secret). It is that he has become too removed from the political game.

And that's has been Cheney's Achilles' heel as veep—he doesn't hear the politics of things anymore. He didn't hear them in the first term much when he held secret meetings with energy lobbyists, refused to detail the sessions and then fought the matter through the courts as White House aides cringed. He didn't hear them on torture and ran way past the fence line last year in trying to prevent the enactment of John McCain's reasonable insistence that Army interrogators stick to the rulebook. And I'm betting he didn't hear them last weekend in Texas, when he should have realized that the actions of a vice president are never private. But he's a veep without a future, and that means he doesn't have his ears on.