Posted on 02/20/2007 8:54:38 PM PST by Irish Rose
Republicans' Cheney Problem
By Bruce Bartlett
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Republican Party has a huge problem going into 2008. Usually, it has a clear frontrunner going into the process who is broadly acceptable to most Republicans. But in this election cycle, that is not true. The race is wide open and it is hard to predict who will be left standing when the last primary vote is cast.
One thing that can be predicted is that a great many Republicans will be dissatisfied with their party's presidential nominee. It won't matter who among those currently running ends up with the nomination, because, in my opinion, none have the capacity to unite the party or to stimulate the kind of intense support a nominee needs to win the general election.
Moreover, I think the Democrats will be united around their candidate, whoever it is. They have been out of the White House for a long time and feel, rightly or wrongly, that the last two elections were stolen from them. They won't let that happen again. Nor do I think it is likely that the Democrats will run three historically awful campaigns in a row. They are due for a rebound.
One thing that could have changed things for the better, from the Republican point of view, is if it had a sitting vice president who was a candidate. That person would at least be the prohibitive favorite for the nomination. While this is no guarantee of success in the general election, it can be very helpful. For example, it is doubtful that George H.W. Bush would have been elected in 1988 otherwise.
That the Republicans do not have a sitting vice president running for the presidential nomination in 2008 is entirely George W. Bush's doing. In 2004, he decided that he would rather have a vice president who would never question him than one who could carry on his legacy. As Bush explained in a Feb. 12, 2007 interview on C-SPAN:
"From my perspective, it is good not to have a vice president running for president. Can you imagine somebody out there running and all of a sudden saying, 'Well, I wouldn't have done it exactly that way.' When things got difficult, like they are in Iraq, I told the president that he should have done it this way. He chose another way.' In other words, there would be the tendency for a candidate who was associated with the president to feel like they needed to distance themselves during the tough moments, like right now, and that would create instability inside the administration."
Most presidents have not looked at it this way. They usually have wanted a vice president who could succeed them, to carry on and defend their policies and, perhaps, protect them and their supporters from retaliation from a political rival or a president from another party. Rather than giving the vice president an incentive to distance himself from the president, the necessity of having his endorsement has forced vice presidents to defend his policies even when he would have preferred to go in a different direction. Think of Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He probably would have opposed Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy if he hadn't been the vice president.
Another virtue of having a vice president with ambitions of his own is that he is the only senior White House official in a position to resist the sycophancy that always surrounds the president. This is important because presidents live in a bubble, surrounded by people who owe their power and position solely to him. They are loath to be seen as "out of the loop" or to read news stories about their imminent departure, when they had no such plans. This tends to make the White House staff highly responsive to the president's wants, biases and whims.
Once into a second term, the vice president cannot be fired and his own ambitions will encourage him to pressure the president into adopting policies and taking positions that will be popular with voters. Since presidents cannot run for a third term, they would otherwise be totally impervious to public opinion. If a vice president hopes to be elected president himself, he has a strong incentive to advise the president to adopt policies that will make it easier for him to win.
For these reasons, I think Dick Cheney's lack of ambition for the presidency has been more of a handicap to Bush than the blessing he sees it as. It has fostered insularity at the White House and closed off an important avenue of influence to the president that has encouraged him to take a "go it alone" attitude, which is bad both for the country and the Republican Party.
Thanks. spikeytx86 does have a point. I have encouraged folks I know to write the RNC and the NRCC, and tell them in plain English, no more money until they start promoting or supporting Hunter. If they don't, our contributions will go directly to the Hunter campaign.
I think if you sign up with the GOP website you'll automatically be targeted with phone solicitations, where you can say exactly that.
This president has done some good things that just about everyone forgets.
He's had no help from democrats and not much help from the stupid Republicans.
He has kept this country safe from another terrorist attack and he certainly has been a million times better than Clinton's.
How quickly we forget what the Clinton's did to this country.
Sheesh
I believe I stated rightly or wrongly. It matters little what we think, but what the people in general think. And well they do not think very highly of GWB.
You have a very tin ear.
No, you're not the only one. I think GWB has done a reasonably good job. Economy has been humming along, we haven't had a lot of terrorist attacks. I think he stumbled on immigration and winning the peace in Iraq, but he has certainly pursued solutions -- I just don't agree with them.
And look who was incumbent president - Ronald Reagan, so popular he had crushed his last opponent in a 49-state landslide.
Post #10 posted on 02/20/2007 9:04:46 PM PST by DTogo: The whole Bush entourage needs to go.
Point made and verified! LOL
No, you aren't the only one. But who can figure out the priorities of the detractors. I could swear, reading the Rudy threads, that the most important issues to many people here are guns, gays and abortion. That yardstick, however, gets tossed when it comes to measuring the President and it's replaced with one marked with spending, the November elections, immigration, etc.
Cheney 2008
Rudy is golden on the WOT issue.
***Rudy doesn't get it. The WOT issue is becoming linked to illegal immigration as a security threat, and Rudy is soft on illegal aliens, among other things.
Brilliant analysis.
--- Allows an avenue for terrorists to walk across our borders
---Cost the taxpayers billions of dollars
The other issue is not vetoeing tremendous spending bills.
Another big problem with this line of thought is the mistaken belief that a tough primary hurts a candidate. The truth is that the most successful candidates in the general election often come from tough primaries. The last really big primary comeback was in 1992 when Bill Clinton absorbed some early losses to win the nomination. That hard-fought primary gave the Democrats eight years in the White House. Before that, one of the biggest primary comebacks was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan came back after losing early primaries. He went on to a big win that kept the Republicans in the White House for 12 years and arguably for 20 of the last 28 years.
The problem for the Republicans will not be a tough primary. The problem will only be the failure to find a good candidate. I haven't seen a candidate who shows that strength, but having a weak candidate as the heir apparent in the V.P. position wouldn't solve the problem either.
Bill
President Dick Cheney ... It works for me!
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