Watching all of the changes that Bush’s administration has made recently, that thread came to mind, and I started wondering. Have the recent replacements been part of a package that will culminate with Dick Cheney stepping down, to be replaced by someone that could be the Republican nominee for POTUS in 2008? Is this all part of a plan to position the New Winning Team for the next presidential election?
Does this scenario look more or less likely then it did the first time it was presented, in February.
Except, what does the annointed heir get out of the deal?
Trouble is, everyone who can read a newspaper can see Bush’s poll results. He’s in the crapper right now. Even if one believed that Bush was doing a heck of a job and he’s just being misunderestimated, the annointed heir has to actually win the 2008 election. Being tied to the Bush administration would just be a liability.
So to accept the vice-presidential appointment the annointed heir would have to be someone so lacking in political sense that they believe being appointed VP would actually increase their chances in 2008. Which pretty much limits the field to Bush family retainers and administration lackeys. And none of them stand a chance in 2008. Condaleeza Rice isn’t going to run for president in 2008, she’s never held an elective office or ran for anything. Not gonna happen.
So a midseason replacement for Cheney isn’t going to be hoping the old Bush family magic rubs off on him for 2008. If this happens at all it will be someone with no further ambitions who doesn’t mind propping up Bush for a few more years for the good of the Republican party.
The Republican nominee in 2008 will be a current Republican governor, not a Bush administration figure, not a Senator or Representative. And none of those ambitious governors is going to come within 1000 miles of Washington DC for the next 2 years if they know what’s good for them. Who’s going to risk getting contaminated with the stink of the congressional scandals and Bush’s disasterous approval ratings?
Of course Bush still has his loyal fanbase. But that fanbase is not going to be large enough to put a Bush lackey in the white house in 2008.
Any Republican running for president in 2008 is going to have to distance themselves from Bush to a greater or lesser degree. That would be almost impossible if you were Bush/Cheney’s hand-picked replacement VP.
But if you’re a governor, you’re automatically distanced from Bush, you don’t have to work to distance yourself. You can pick and chose the things you want to endorse, and still remain untouched by the Bush administration aroma. You get the best of both worlds…continuity with any remaining popular Bush policies, and a sharp break with the unpopular ones.
If it was anything more than a half-baked idea, you’d think it would have been done by now. Being the incumbent veep is certainly no edge, since no sitting veep was elected president between Martin VanBuren and George HW Bush.
What if Bush could make enough changes to make today the bottom? If things actually started to improve. The new VP could try to take credit for 2 years of improvement. He or she could be the person that “Turned this country around”.
But how does that work, to take credit for turning the country around? To do that wouldn’t you first have to admit that Bush and Cheney have fucked up all day every day for the last 6 years? That can’t happen, because the VP doesn’t have any constitutional power beyond what the president delegates to him, except for casting tiebreaking votes in the Senate. The Vice-Presidency was famously described as not worth a bucket of warm spit.
So the VP couldn’t shake things up and “turn the country around” because the VP can’t DO anything, really. If Bush were sky-high in the polls, maybe, maybe someone ambitious might consider the post. But even if Bush manages to limp back to mediocrity, “I kept Bush from sucking so bad” doesn’t exactly make a ringing campaign slogan.
A Vice President can’t take credit for that. The best he could do is say that they made a good team and do the ‘if you liked X Y and Z in the last two years, vote for me.’ But the President is the one in charge; it’s not an equal partnership and the VP has no real power. I suspect that Vice Presidents running for the Presidency tend not to win because not only can they not even get half the credit for anything, they have trouble talking about the problems of the sitting President.
As I always do when the Cheney-quits topic comes up, I’ll ask this question: what’s in it for Cheney?
Yeah, it’s hard to drop below 40% approval w/o digging into some of the hard-core Bush supporters (or folks who were in that category at some point).
The only way a VP swap would make sense is if things strated going well in Iraq and we started pulling troops out big time. I still think Bush will start drawing down some troops this summer, and that might stop his slide in the polls at least temporarily. But I don’t see a major reduction in troops until later in the year (best case). By then it’ll be too late to pull a switch. Anytime after this summer will look to orchestrated.