Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Bush's choice of Dick Cheney has conservatives brimming with confidence. But so are centrist Democrats.
Jul 25, 2000 | It was October 1976, President Gerald Ford had screwed up royally and no one wanted to be the one to tell him.
During his second debate with his Democratic challenger, then Gov. Jimmy Carter, Ford had declared that "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" -- certainly news to the Soviet troops then occupying Poland, not to mention to anyone who knew anything about world affairs. As the days passed and Ford tried ineptly to hide from his gaffe, Carter pounced, white ethnic voters shrieked and the chattering class tut-tutted.
It was left to one man to tell Ford that he needed to address the problem: Ford's White House chief of staff, Richard Cheney. Cheney, then only 35 years old, took his boss aside and delivered the ugly truth, and soon Ford was acknowledging to reporters that the situation in Eastern Europe was "tragic."
For Republicans, Cheney is this solid, sturdy man -- a conservative voice of reason with a moderate temperament, a former secretary of defense that the Bush team hopes you might remember from former President George Bush's salad days immediately after the Gulf War. For a politician, he projects a certain apolitical way. He knows Washington, knows how to get things done. Serious. Smart. Makes the trains run on time. Whether or not Cheney's nomination actually wins George W. Bush any votes, if Bush actually wins, Republicans say, America will be better off because of Cheney's presence in the White House.
But Democrats are also popping the champagne corks with the news of Bush's pick. First, many on Al Gore's team were worried that Bush would pick something other than a fleshy old white Protestant male. (And another Methodist, at that.)
But more than that, many Dems feel that with Cheney come numbers -- 3 heart attacks + 3 Republican administrations of olde + 5 military deferments during the Vietnam War + countless far-far-far-right House votes to slam him on -- that they are confident won't add up.
"The Gore campaign has had a lot of bad luck," says one high-ranking Democratic official. "This is good luck."
On wedge issues like gun control and nutrition programs for seniors and children, Cheney as a congressman often took the hard-line conservative view, occasionally voting with only a handful of others.
In May 1988, for instance, Cheney was one of only four members of the House to be on the losing end of a 413-4 House vote that banned the sale, manufacture or importation of plastic weapons that are undetectable by airport screening machines. The bill's supporters argued that, in law enforcement's efforts to combat terrorism, it was not an undue burden on gun owners to require that their weapons contain at least 3.7 ounces of electromagnetically detectable metal, the minimum amount that can be detected by airport security devices. Cheney disagreed.
And there are a lot more where that vote came from, Cheney having served as Wyoming's congressman from his election in 1978, through the Reagan revolution, until President George Bush tapped him to serve as secretary of defense in March 1989.
Don't be surprised when you hear Democrats describing him as having frequently voted to the right of his class of '78 colleague, Georgia's Newt Gingrich. On Dec. 17, 1985, for instance, Cheney was one of only 21 members of Congress who opposed a ban on armor-piercing "cop-killer" bullets. (Joe Sudbay, who works on legislative outreach for the Center for the Prevention of Handgun Violence, says Cheney has "never voted with us. Never ever. Never came close.")
In 1984, he was one of only 12 House members to vote against the Older Americans Act amendments, which added to a program providing nutrition assistance for seniors. In 1987, he was one of only eight House members to vote against $1.6 billion for Older Americans Act programs and, when the bill returned to the House after the House-Senate Conference Committee, one of only seven who opposed adoption of the conference committee report.
Additionally, as the Sierra Club was quick to point out on Monday, Cheney is a disaster on the environment -- one of only 21 who voted against the Safe Water Drinking Act in 1986, and one of only eight who voted against reauthorizing the Clean Water Act. The League of Conservation Voters reports that Cheney's lifetime average of voting on environmentally friendly legislation is just 13 percent.
Get Salon in your mailbox!