1 Boring Old Man

A Strong Push From Back Stage

… Cheney has changed history more than once, earning his reputation as the nation’s most powerful vice president. His impact has been on public display in the arenas of foreign policy and homeland security, and in a long-running battle to broaden presidential authority. But he has also been the unseen hand behind some of the president’s major domestic initiatives.

Scores of interviews with advisers to the president and vice president, as well as with other senior officials throughout the government, offer a backstage view of how the Bush White House operates. The president is "the decider," as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.

Cheney led a group that winnowed the president’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches — and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI — over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate political corruption in Congress.

And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. He shaped and pushed through Bush’s tax cuts, blunting the influence of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a longtime friend, and of Cabinet rivals he had played a principal role in selecting. He managed to overcome the president’s "compassionate conservative" resistance to multiple breaks for the wealthy. He even orchestrated a decision to let a GOP senator switch parties — giving control of the chamber to Democrats — rather than meet the senator’s demand for billions of dollars in new spending.

Chapter 3 in the Washington Post series paints a slightly different picture of Cheney than the former installments. Some things are the same – working behind the scenes leaving few fingerprints, tireless devotion to whatever task presents itself, a broad range of political and interpersonal skills, a firm grasp on the technical issues and details of a given issue, and extreme effectiveness. What’s different is the content. In this installment, we’re told about Cheney’s skillful handling and manipulation of a variety of matters. While I don’t particularly agree with his choices, I have to admire his skill. He is known as the most powerful Vice President in history. It would be equally true to say he’s the most effective Chief of Staff in history [or maybe the most politically savvy "President" in history]. In the issues described here, he’s on top of his game. From a Psychiatric point of view, he’s what is known as a "Successful Narcissist" – his self-confidence and felt sense of rightness hold him in good stead. People are drawn to the kind of confidence such people have. For example:

When Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, broached the idea of limiting the popular mortgage tax deduction, he said he quickly dropped it after Cheney told him it would never fly with Congress. "He’s a big timesaver for us in that he takes off the table a lot of things he knows aren’t going to go anywhere," Lazear said.

Lazear, who is otherwise known as a fierce advocate for his views, said that he may argue a point with Cheney "for 10 minutes or so" but that in the end he is always convinced. "I can’t think of a time when I have thought I was right and the vice president was wrong."

As far as Greenspan knew, the vice president agreed with him on the danger of the tax package Bush was contemplating. The Federal Reserve chairman worried that the sheer size of the cuts would drown the federal budget in red ink.

…

So Greenspan sent Cheney a study by one of the central bank’s senior economists showing that big deficits lead to higher long-term interest rates, according to a person with firsthand knowledge. Higher rates, Greenspan believed, would wipe out any short-term benefit from a tax cut.

In subsequent meetings with the Fed chief, Cheney never took issue with the study. What Greenspan did not know was that, behind the scenes, the vice president took steps to undermine an argument that could threaten the big tax cut he favored. Conda, the vice president’s aide, said Cheney asked him to critique the study. Conda attached his own memo arguing that the Fed’s analytical model was flawed. He said "it wasn’t my job to know" what Cheney did with the paperwork, but noted that Greenspan’s study did not gain traction inside the White House.

O’Neill continued to oppose the tax cut on grounds that the government was moving toward "fiscal crisis," irritating Cheney. "The vice president really got a sense of where O’Neill was coming from and surmised it was a problem," Conda said. The following month, Cheney would demand O’Neill’s resignation.

I’m reminded of a powerful article in Rolling Stone before the 2004 election, The Curse of Dick Cheney. It’s worth a read today, if you haven’t seen it. And I think of Aristotle’s Poetics frequently as I read this series. It’s a theory of Dramatic Tragedy that holds that the fall of the character comes about from a "tragic character flaw" that is apparent throughout the story, and ultimately brings about the character’s downfall. Dick Cheney is a flawed man, and blind to his own flaws. In spite of his incredible effectiveness as a politician, he has an exaggerated sense of his own rightness, and presses forward with campaigns that would be better let go of. He also hasn’t got much of a moral compass. He doesn’t seem to make a distinction between effective political strategies and sleaze – and dips into the latter with some regularity. But mainly, it is his hypertrophied sense of his own rightness that often leads him [and us] into very murky waters. It is this trait that is his "tragic character flaw." In the end, Dick Cheney has artfully lead us down the most destructive path in our history, in my way of thinking. He has amassed power and applied it to ends that are destructive to our form of government, to our place in the world, and to our future – he is a human weapon of mass destruction.

I’ve never bought the theory of the Bush-Cheney relationship as Pinocchio-Geppetto — it lets Bush off too easily to imagine that Cheney pulls all the strings. But it’s clear that Cheney is the toughest, smartest infighter in the administration and that his toughness and smarts have been employed partly in service of an independent agenda. Cheney came into office believing that the presidency — and, by extension, the vice presidency — had been deflated, and he set out to puff them back up again.

Students of public administration should have to take a course called "Cheney." How he has amassed and employed his power offers a case study in how government really works — and how a skillful operator can make a bureaucracy dance. Take Cheney’s penchant for secrecy, which seems to border on the maniacal. His office stamps "SECRET" on routine documents, including talking points for officials to use with reporters. He keeps papers pertaining to everyday business in huge Mosler safes. Is this loopy? No, he’s just putting into practice the dictum that information is power. Sunshine is for losers.

The vice president, whose Secret Service code name is "Angler," really does know all the angles. And above all, he knows how to survive. His onetime mentor Donald Rumsfeld is gone, his onetime top aide Scooter Libby is on his way to jail, yet Cheney — defiantly, disastrously, unbelievably — remains. It will take years to uncover and undo all the damage he has wrought.