Whether you liked Dick Cheney or not, he was an incredibly influential figure in Bush’s presidency. He expanded the powers of the Vice President, and is a major reason the U.S. ended up responding to 9/11 the way it did.
But what if Bush had chosen someone else? I can’t find a good list of alternate candidates, because Cheney was unsurprisingly hush-hush even when heading Bush’s VP selection committee. But if you want someone in particular: What if Bush had chosen Elizabeth Dole as his running mate? How would history be different?
(Assume for the purposes of this question that Bush ended up being sworn in as president, whomever he chose.)
I’ve always wondered how, after months of leading the veep vetting process, Cheney announced himself as the pick to the rest of the Bush campaign. The scene, in my mind, is nothing short of hilarious.
Bush might have floundered even more, but he might have floundered in a better direction, depending on who the Veep was. A Times Magazine article last Sunday said Cheney was not quite the master people thought, and in any case Bush was more independent after 2004, culminating in him not pardoning Libby which really pissed Cheney off.
An actual fiscal conservative (there were still a few in the GOP at the time) might have steered him away from squandering the surplus he inherited. An actual foreign policy realist (see previous parenthetical note) might have gotten him to pay attention to his daily briefings or (if the 9-11 attacks happened anyway) limited the retaliation to the actual perpetrators.
I personally don’t think Cheney was the secret mastermind of the Bush administration that he was portrayed as. He was certainly a prominent voice in the administration but he wasn’t leading Bush anywhere he didn’t want to go. He may have been the “bad cop” to Bush’s “good cop” but they were both in agreement on their agenda.
If Bush had some other VP and that VP had tried to tell Bush things he didn’t want to hear, then he would have just been shut out of the inner circle. Cheney was able to have influence because he was in agreement with what Bush already wanted.
I read the following story somewhere - I thought it was in excerpts of the Washington Post series (and later book) on Cheney titled “Angler” http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/ but I can’t find it there tonight. (BTW, I think “Angler” was his Secret Service code name, since he liked fishing. “Edgar” fits too damn well.)
Where ever I read it, I recall that Cheney and his people on the VP committee had an extremely invasive process each potential VP candidate had to go through. It included detailed medical history, private life, financial review, taxes, other scandals. Anyone who did not want to disclose that level of detail was removed from the process. Anyone with any issue in any of those areas was removed from consideration. By the time Cheney and his crew were done, only Cheney was left. Even though Cheney, with his long and public history of heart disease, would have been rejected by that process as not healthy enough for the stresses of the job. Cheney found a reason to exclude every other candidate while he improved his working relationship with GWB. Then he “let” GWB decide on a VEEP candiate that was standing right in front of him. I think of this as a classic “magician’s force”. The mark thinks he has free will, but he doesn’t.
Later when a sitting Republican governor, who had been considered for the VP slot, was up for a cabinet post, Cheney of his people found him insufficient somehow, and the governor’s secret medical records leaked (I think just within the White House). Someone else got the cabinet post.
It’s possible that Bush/Not Cheney would have won in 2000 - Cheney provided some gravitas but so might have others. It was a terribly close election. But the 43rd Presidency would have been very different without Cheney running things.
As far as I can tell the only thing Cheney wanted that he did not get was a full pardon for Scooty Libby. GWB merely commuted his sentence. Lesson: Don’t betray a CIA agent, unless your boss is the VP.
To the OP, I think we’d have probably had the 9/11 attacks - the GWB adminstration was so wrapped up in doing everything differently from the Clinton Administration that the same balls would have been dropped. 9/11 was less than 9 months from the inaugural. But maybe no Iraq War, maybe Bin Laden gets caught at Tora Bora if we weren’t moving people and assets to Iraq before 12/11/01, maybe the worst civil rights violations of that time (and since!!) might have been avoided. Or maybe GWB drops into a post-9/11 funk worse than Stalin’s fugue after Hitler invaded Russia. Or anything in between. I’ve Godwin’ed myself out of the rest of this, but the speculative possibilities are too broad.
(Or would that be Godwinski’s Law - that a long enough thread will have a comaprison to Stalin … )
That’s a possible interpretation. But another one is that Bush chose Cheney for the job of reviewing VP candidates because he knew Cheney agreed with him on all major issues. And at some point there was a realization that this accord that made Cheney the best person for picking a VP candidate also made Cheney the best VP candidate.
The real question is not “Who would be Bush’s V.P.?” but “Who would be Bush’s inner circle of advisors?” The Vice President has little direct power.
The Secretaries of State (Colin Powell) and Treausury (Paul O’Neill) have more direct power than the V.P. but were never included in Bush’s inner circle. Instead the despicable Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were allowed to serve as the puppetmasters almost unmolested.
I think it’s fine for a President to be a generalist who relies on experts to set policy. But the President needs strong principles and a firm hand to enforce those principles. Instead George W. Bush was way past his depth, had almost no relevant talent or knowledge (except his “people skills”), had no intellectual curiosity, and was easily manipulated.
Just recently read, not sure where, that Bush actually suggested it first. There’s a quote that goes something like: “The guy I’m actually looking for is sitting across the table from me right now”.
As for the OP, that’s a really interesting “what if”. Certainly there were plenty of other folks in the Bush administration bent on invading Iraq (Rumsfeld comes immediately to mind), but let’s suppose Colin Powell had be VP and that Cheney was no where to be seen.
Still, it was pretty easy for Bush to get the AUMF passed in Oct '02 (when the Democrats controlled the Senate), which I think we can assume would have happened anyway, and once given that authority, I think Bush was pretty much set on invading.
The part that’s left out in most accounts is what happened three seconds before Bush said that; Cheney waved his hand in Bush’s general direction and said “The guy you’re actually looking for is sitting across the table from you right now.”
I agree with Little Nemo (big surprise there). Cheney had a lot of influence over Bush because, while it might not have occurred to Bush naturally to be so unrelentingly evil, at the end of the day he believed in doing evil things, and Cheney just helped remind him just how terrible of a place he could take our country. He didn’t change Bush’s mind and control him, he just helped remind him how to be the worst president he could be.
