by H. N. Burdett
Perhaps the split screen face-off between Joe Biden and Dick Cheney on ABC's "This Week" Sunday is finally accomplishing what more than 220 years of constitutional government in this country has not: defining the role of the Vice President of the United States.
While it may be rather unseemly if not needlessly time consuming for the President to back up at every juncture and explain why his administration did or did not do this or that whenever the loyal opposition chooses to go on the attack, that job is tailor-made for the number two guy. Certainly the role is infinitely more constructive than attending state occasions or just sitting around filling time and space, but being prepared in the event that something bad happens to the President.
More than that, as Cheney is now demonstrating, the role of virtual defense counsel for the President is a worthy challenge for a former Vice President. In Cheney's case, he was easily the most interesting character in the entire dramatis personae of the Bush administration. Valid or not the public impression was that Cheney rather than George W. Bush was calling the shots during those eight years, that W. was merely playing Charlie McCarthy to Cheney's Edgar Bergen. And I, for one, have always found it more fascinating to focus upon the puppeteer rather than the puppet. But Cheney, if indeed he was the puppeteer for which he is credited or blamed, was an elusive one.
Immediately after 9/11, Vice President Cheney disappeared. He may have been functioning perfectly well daily during this period, providing invaluable service to his President and the country he had taken an oath to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. But we, the vast unwashed, were not aware of it. He instead became the butt of interminable standup routines of various late night television hosts. But resurface he did, to defend outrages at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to tell the nation and the world that we were at war and, in the Bush administration view, which is, mind you, very different from that of namby-pamby liberals, in a war it is okay to waterboard, just fine to torture and otherwise humiliate enemy combatants because that's the way to get key information that saves American lives.
What kind of key actionable information did all this torture and humiliation bring us, Mr. Vice President, and what and how many lives were saved because of it? Well, he was not at liberty to answer that leftist-tainted question. But, he implied with his patented sneer and smirk: Lots. Never mind that the "information" one gets from prisoners, most especially prisoners motivated by religious or patriotic fervor, may be about as reliable as something you may get from any street corner anywhere in the world.
To the point, defense of any past administration may well be be a valid and important function for a Vice President. For past administrations are continuously blamed, fairly or unfairly, for the shortcomings of current administrations. It has been said, in fact, that the only administration that did not blame its predecessors was that of George Washington. Even then, one might consider the steps President Washington took against that previous administration when he was General Washington.
Who better to explain what the past administration was doing or trying to do whenever it is blamed for this or that by a current administration than the Vice President? The obvious answer is the President. But even a society that has been criticized if not condemned for its disregard of even the basic tenets of civility might give someone who has served as President of the United States, arguably the most arduous, most unforgiving, most complex and debilitating job in the world, at least a temporary pass from responding to such queries.
Besides, the former President's side of the story can be told in the inevitable memoir for which obscene royalties always seem to be available. Such luxury is not generally afforded to Vice Presidents. No one reads their memoirs, therefore no royalties are offered and, ergo, if written they go unpublished.
But Dick Cheney may be the exception to this otherwise inviolable rule, considering that, rightly or wrongly, the public at large seems to believe that he was the real president, or at least the guy calling all the more important shots, during the administration of Bush the Younger. Indeed his memoirs would probably drive publishers' bidding up well beyond any offer that might be made to the perceived nominal chief executive.
And, by the way, what has former President Bush been up to amid these Biden-Cheney exchanges over prisoners, Miranda rights and general conduct of the war? True, he may indeed be entitled to rest and relaxation in the wake of an unbelievably turbulent Presidency. For whether or not he was really running the country, in the eyes of many Americans, even the jaundiced eyes of those who see Cheney as more of a villain than W., the former President still must shoulder much of the blame and thus suffer his share of the venom and vitriol dispensed by those he disappointed and those who never cared much for him from the get-go.
It's not all that difficult to close your eyes and imagine W. leaning back in his favorite chair, wearing flannel shirt and jeans, cowboy boots removed and at his side, stretching his legs so his feet rest just so on an overstuffed cushion, his eyes fixed upon his mega-screen telly, as he aims the remote at the Biden-Cheney show. And his very first thought has his familiar vaguely simian smile forming and freezing in place: that sometimes you really can live with being thought of as nothing more than a figurehead.
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