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Cheney's Presence More Scarce at White House
By MIKE ALLEN, TIME
(Nov. 13) -- The signs, apparent to insiders
for months, surfaced at a quick clip. Vice President
Dick Cheney, once viewed as training wheels for
a President who was a novice on the world stage,
was becoming less essential.
He disappeared to a new weekend place in Maryland,
and friends fretted about his weight. Katrina hit,
and he tarried at his home in Wyoming, checking
in by videoconference. Harriet Miers was picked
for the Supreme Court, and he found out secondhand.
On Capitol Hill last week, the Republican Party
was coping with an impasse over spending cuts and
the fallout from an embarrassing loss in the Virginia
Governor's race, and he was in South Dakota for
a week of pheasant hunting. "I just haven't
seen him around as much lately," said Sam Brownback,
the conservative Republican Senator from Kansas.
Friends say Cheney is well aware that his unique
bond with the President, while not broken, is diminished.
"He has become," said a former aide still
close to the White House, "one adviser among
many." Renewing his relationship with a troubled
President, the friends say, has become a more urgent
mission for the 64-year-old Vice President than
bolstering his own sagging public image.
The President's poll ratings remain at a five-year
low, and two of the big reasons are a discouraging
war for which Cheney served as head hawk, and the
indictment of Cheney's chief of staff in an investigation
that sprang from a heavy-handed White House effort
to discredit an annoying critic. The prosecutor's
narrative makes tantalizing reference to one or
more conversations Cheney had about the matter with
the aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, which raises
the possibility of a fight for the Vice President's
testimony.
Cheney, according to friends and subordinates, sees
himself as an uber-staffer whose mission is to shape
and promote the President's agenda, even at the
expense of his own popularity. Lately, with the
Vice President making a signature issue out of opposing
new restrictions on the treatment of suspected terrorists,
the price has been steep. In one poll, Cheney's
approval rating slipped into the 20s, and a former
White House nemesis has gained traction on the issue.
Republican John McCain, the Senate's most famous
prisoner of war, has won strong bipartisan support
for a ban on inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists
and other detainees, and is fighting Cheney's push
for an exemption for the CIA. With the issue in
the headlines, McCain raised just over $1 million
last week for his probable presidential campaign.
A former Administration official sees Cheney's lack
of interest in running for President as a liability.
"It liberates him to risk his own standing
on behalf of the policy and the President,"
the official said. "But it can be a real problem
when that approach starts to affect the President's
standing." And while the Vice President's partisans
remain convinced that most conservatives still love
him, even some of those bedrock fans are expressing
growing doubts.
“Cheney's war is swallowing Bush's presidency,"
said a conservative leader who is an ally of the
Vice President's. "The cost of Iraq is everything
else Bush wanted to do." Cheney's office argues,
of course, that the partnership continues on the
same keel. "Obviously," said Steve Schmidt,
Cheney's counselor, "the Vice President works
tirelessly every day on behalf of the American people,
alongside President Bush."
One problem, according to former staff members,
is the tightness of the Veep's circle. He relies
heavily on his wife Lynne and two daughters, Elizabeth
and Mary, for advice on media and internal politics.
Insiders took his decision to replace Libby with
counsel David S. Addington as a sign that Cheney
was circling the wagons rather than making peace
with his detractors inside the government. They
reason that Addington is a hard-liner who has made
enemies around the West Wing with his unwillingness
to cooperate or yield on troublesome issues like
a court fight for access to records of Cheney's
energy task force.
In the end, it's Cheney's steely certainty, a quality
the President has so appreciated in the past, that
may be most damaging to him now in this season of
political reinvention, say people who have worked
closely with the Vice President. While Bush has
shown an ability to reverse himself in the face
of heavy headwinds, suddenly embracing the 9/11
commission or campaign-finance reform, Cheney takes
pride in not backing down.
In March 2004, when Cheney was about to walk onstage
to deliver his first formal excoriation of Senator
John Kerry as being soft on Saddam, a frantic aide
telephoned to urge him to tone it down. A suicide
car bomber had just torn the front off a hotel in
central Baghdad. Cable news was going crazy, and
aides had nightmares of Cheney speaking in split
screen with smoldering rubble.
According to a person familiar with the incident,
Cheney raised his right eyebrow, gave a quarter
grin and shook off the advice. "The guy cannot
be unnerved," the person said. A former Administration
official put it this way: "If the VP isn't
proven right until after he has kicked off, he's
fine with that. The idea of being proved right before
the end of his life is a false deadline in his mind.
Right is right."
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