See Dick Run (the Country)
By Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect
Posted on August 29, 2006, Printed on August 29, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/40960/George W. Bush has been faulted in some quarters for taking an extended
vacation while the Middle East festers. It doesn't much matter; the man
running the country is Vice President Dick Cheney.
When historians look back on the multiple assaults on our
constitutional system of government in this era, Cheney's unprecedented
role will come in for overdue notice. Cheney's shotgun mishap, when he
accidentally sprayed his host with birdshot, has gotten more media
attention than has his control of the government.
Historically, the vice president's job was to ceremonially preside over
the Senate, attend second-tier foreign funerals, and be prepared for
the president to die. Students are taught that John Nance Garner,
Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, compared the job to a bucket
of warm spit (and historians say spit was not the word the pungent
Texan actually used).
Recent vice presidents Walter Mondale and Al Gore were given more
authority than most, but there was no doubt that the president was in
charge.
Cheney is in a class by himself. The administration's grand strategy
and its implementation are the work of Cheney -- sometimes Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sometimes Cheney and political
director Karl Rove.
Cheney has planted aides in major Cabinet departments, often over the
objection of a Cabinet secretary, to make sure his policies are carried
out. He sits in on the Senate Republican caucus, to stamp out any
rebellions. Cheney loyalists from the Office of the Vice President
dominate interagency planning meetings.
The Iraq war is the work of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The capture of the
career civil service is pure Cheney. The disciplining of Congress is
the work of Cheney and Rove. The turning over of energy policy to the
oil companies is Cheney. The extreme secrecy is Cheney and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales.
If Cheney were the president, more of this would be smoked out because
the press would be paying attention. The New York Times' acerbic
columnist Maureen Dowd regularly makes sport of Cheney's dominance, and
there are plenty of jokes (Bush is a heartbeat away from the
presidency). But you can count serious newspaper or magazine articles
on Cheney's operation on the fingers of one hand. One of the first was
by Bob Dreyfuss writing in the Prospect -- "Vice Squad," on all the
vice-president's men, which ran in our May issue. Another notable
example is Charlie Savage's important May 28th piece in The Boston
Globe on Cheney operative David Addington, the architect and chief
reviewer of legislation for "signing statements." The most
comprehensive was Jane Mayer's fine piece in the July 3 New Yorker on
Addington.
Cheney's power is matched only by his penchant for secrecy. When
Dreyfuss requested the names of people who serve on the vice
president's staff, he was told this was classified information. Former
staffers for other departments provided Dreyfuss with names. This
journalism requires a lot of hard work, but it is gettable because so
many people in government have been sandbagged by the Cheney operation
and are willing to provide information.
So secretive is Cheney (and so incurious the media) that when his chief
of staff, Irving Lewis Libby, was implicated in the leaked identity of
CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, reporters who rushed to look Libby up
on Nexis and Google found that Libby had barely rated previous press
attention. Why does this matter? Because if the man actually running
the government is out of the spotlight, the administration and its
policies are far less accountable.
When George W. Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry in 2004, many
commentators observed that Bush was the fellow with whom you would
rather have a beer. It's an accurate and unflattering comment on the
American electorate -- but then who wants to have a beer with Cheney?
The public may not know the details of his operation, but voters
intuitively recoil from him. Bush's popularity ratings are now under 40
percent, beer or no, reflecting dwindling confidence in where he is
taking the country. But Cheney's ratings are stuck around 20 percent,
far below that of any president.
If Cheney were the actual president, not just the de facto one, he
simply could not govern with the same set of policies and approval
ratings of 20 percent. The media focuses relentless attention on the
president, on the premise that he is actually the chief executive. But
for all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in the
ceremonial role of the queen of England. Yet the press buys the
pretense of Bush being "the decider," and relentlessly covers Bush --
meeting with world leaders, cutting brush, holding press conferences,
while Cheney works in secret, largely undisturbed. So let's take half
the members of the overblown White House press corps, which has almost
nothing to do anyway, and send them over to Cheney Boot Camp for
Reporters. They might learn how to be journalists again, and we might
learn who is running the government.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column
originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
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