If he were a couple years younger and his health was better, I say Cheney could give the RATS all they wanted and more in 2008. Cheney vs. The Hildebeaste? Yummy!!
Posted on 01/30/2003 7:57:50 PM PST by Pokey78
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — As the White House buzzed with preparations for the State of the Union address and some allies protested the administration's march toward war in Iraq, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pulled up their chairs on Monday for their weekly lunch. Their privacy was sacrosanct, administration officials said: No one but the steward was allowed in the small dining room off the Oval Office. Afterward, as usual, Mr. Cheney refused to tell even his top aides what had occurred.
The vice president has largely disappeared from public view since his high-profile campaign appearances last fall. But he is hardly invisible to the president, the man Mr. Cheney's aides call his only constituent. At the start of the third year of the Bush administration, White House officials and outside advisers say Mr. Cheney is ever more powerful. In the last three months, he has immersed himself in three critical areas: national security, the economy and domestic defense.
Mr. Cheney was a driving force behind the administration's Project Bioshield, a plan to protect the nation against biological attack that Mr. Bush announced in his State of the Union address. He was central to the creation of the president's $674 billion economic package. He is wired into the White House plans for a postwar Iraq.
And today, Mr. Cheney opened a public relations offensive to sell the nation on action against Saddam Hussein. In a speech here before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Cheney echoed the themes Mr. Bush laid out on Tuesday night, and closed with a sober warning: "We will not permit a brutal dictator with ties to terror and a record of reckless aggression to dominate the Middle East and to threaten the United States."
Administration officials say Mr. Cheney's largely secretive role — and the fact that he is viewed as not having designs on the presidency himself — are important explanations for his deep influence.
"The vice president is not looking to be president," Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, said in an interview. "Do you know how unusual that is? He is here to be an adviser and counselor to the president."
While Mr. Cheney spends almost no time on social issues like education, Social Security or prescription drugs, aides said, he did serve as mediator between warring factions in the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office over the president's denunciation of the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies.
"He was involved like he always is: deeply involved," said Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel. Mr. Cheney, as is often the case, has not made his position known on the Michigan policies. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
One of Mr. Cheney's biggest concerns is bioterrorism, an issue his advisers say he has studied and worried about for years.
When Mr. Cheney made an unannounced trip last summer to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, administration officials said, he asked intensive questions about the vulnerability of the United States to biological attack. Dissatisfied with what he heard about the agency's plans for responding to a widespread outbreak of smallpox, the vice president returned to Washington and set up dozens of meetings, some at his home, with scientists, Central Intelligence Agency officers and other specialists to figure out what needed to be done.
Within months, officials said, President Bush had accepted almost all of Mr. Cheney's suggestions except for one: a call for every single American to be vaccinated for smallpox. To the president, the idea seemed excessive.
But the episode illustrates how Mr. Cheney immerses himself with great secrecy in the most momentous issues before the Bush administration, then quietly drives his tough views across the landscape of government. "When he does a deep dive," Mr. Card said, "he gets down into the weeds."
Mostly, administration officials said, Mr. Cheney wins.
"He's not the only reason that people are focused on this," said one senior official who works with Mr. Cheney on bioterrorism. "What he has excelled at is pushing the system because of who he is."
Mr. Cheney's influence has expanded even as the president has become a more confident, steadier leader than he was in early 2001, with less need for the vice president's stature to prop him up. Administration officials say Mr. Bush has developed more confidence in Mr. Cheney, who turned 62 today.
At the White House, officials say, Mr. Cheney's aggressive support for an attack on Iraq has prevailed, along with that of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, over the months of caution of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. He takes one of the hardest lines at the White House against North Korea, and has long been the administration's most outspoken critic against Yasir Arafat.
The job, Mr. Cheney's friends say, suits him. He can both counsel the president and plunge into the subjects that interest him, using the full powers of his office to assemble facts and marshal his arguments, without feeling any pressure to justify himself to voters.
Steady, solid and opaque, with a history of heart problems that his friends say will keep him from ever seeking the presidency, Mr. Cheney seems dismissive, if not disdainful, of the traditional view about the public obligations of his job. The vice president rarely gives interviews, infrequently gives policy speeches and spends large blocks of time — much of December, for example —at his mountain home in a gated community in Jackson, Wyo., where he kept in touch with the White House via videoconference.
Mr. Cheney has dodged all questions about his conduct as chief executive at Halliburton, the energy company under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices. He has also repeatedly declined to identify the people who were consulted by his energy task force in 2001.
Both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush have said that the vice president will be on the ticket again in 2004, barring complications with his health, which his doctors have said is good: Mr. Cheney is still down 20 pounds from his weight before he became vice president. Aides say he works out most mornings on a treadmill or stationary bicycle in an exercise room at the vice president's house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory.
He is also described as watching his diet, or at least careful to eat salads at his lunches with Mr. Bush, a fitness enthusiast. But unlike the early-to-bed, teetotaler president, Mr. Cheney makes occasional forays to the dinner tables of establishment Washington, like a party he attended last spring at the Georgetown home of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post.
Mr. Cheney and the president, aides say, do not socialize together much, and Mr. Cheney is not a regular weekend visitor to Camp David. Since mid-November, Mr. Cheney has slipped away for a weekend day of pheasant hunting in Pennsylvania and another day of duck hunting in Arkansas.
On national security, Mr. Cheney has been consumed by planning for the political reconstruction of a post-Hussein Iraq. The plan, so far, is for an American military commander to run the country alongside a civilian administrator, with an eventual transition to an Iraqi-led government. Toward that end, Mr. Cheney met for 45 minutes in his office in mid-January with Barham Salih, the prime minister of Kurdistan and one of several potential future leaders in Iraq.
"He asked questions that signaled to me he's deeply involved in this process," said Mr. Salih. "We talked about the issues of transition."
On domestic defense, Mr. Cheney's office has become a mini-research center on bioterrorism. (I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, is called "germ boy" by other White House aides.) In December, Mr. Cheney spent two hours in an unannounced visit to the National Institutes of Health, where he is said to have become absorbed by research into the development of a vaccine for the ebola virus, a potential weapon of bioterrorists. He is now pursuing a plan to offer government incentives to drug companies to develop better and safer smallpox and anthrax vaccines.
On the economy, Mr. Cheney was a forceful advocate of the centerpiece of the president's economic plan, the elimination of the dividend tax. Aides said he immersed himself in the kind of detail that the president avoids.
"I've seen him go and look at charts of quarter-by-quarter progress of consumption and investment on G.D.P. charts," said one adviser. "He's got his little pencil in hand and he's working through the charts, saying `What does this mean?' "
In coming months, Mr. Cheney is scheduled to criss-cross the country promoting a plan that has run into major objections from voters and Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
"When the administration is in treacherous waters, they'll send the vice president out," said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.
But at a speech earlier this month at the United States Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Cheney read his lines in such a Cheney-esque monotone that he lulled some members of his audience to sleep. Mr. Cheney's advisers acknowledged that his speech on the economy will need punching up before the vice president takes it on the road.
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Cheney, a former congressman from Wyoming, is now the administration's schmoozer and enforcer, and often gives counsel on delicate matters of national security. Two months ago, Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, sought Mr. Cheney's advice about traveling to Baghdad to meet with Mr. Hussein about the fate of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, the only American pilot shot down in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"The vice president weighed in and said now was not the time to go," Mr. Roberts said. The senators wrote a letter to Mr. Hussein instead.
Just before Christmas, Mr. Cheney quietly invited the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, and Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the new Republican majority leader, to talk with a few other lawmakers about Medicare reform and Mr. Bush's economic package.
"You feel when you've talked to the vice president you've talked to the president," said Representative Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who attended the White House meeting.
In 2004, White House aides say that Mr. Cheney will be dispatched frequently around the nation, where he is a superstar among the Republican faithful.
"This is someone who is an incredibly effective retail politician," said Ken Mehlman, the White House political director.
Friends note that Mr. Cheney, who dislikes the backslapping of the campaign trail, dislikes losing a lot more.
"One of the formative experiences of his life was being chief of staff during the Ford presidency when they lost the White House," said former Representative Vin Weber of Minnesota, now an influential lobbyist, who served with Mr. Cheney in the House. "If you've been through that experience, you don't want to go through it again."
As opposed to the previous administration, who just bombed the Balkans.
If he were a couple years younger and his health was better, I say Cheney could give the RATS all they wanted and more in 2008. Cheney vs. The Hildebeaste? Yummy!!
Dick Cheney - we are behind you sir!
And thank you for your honorable and unselfish service to America and for not politicizing the office of the Vice President for political and personal gain.
Finally - a President and his confidant both with honesty, integrity, and love for God and Country.
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