Over in the “Successful Second Term” thread, Brain Glutton roiled the waters by suggesting that Mr. Bush’s resignation and/or suicide would be beneficial to the country. However, it’s not unheard of for Presidents not to serve out a full term, for a variety of reasons, chiefly death but Mr. Nixon resigned.
Assume for whatever reason you care to posit that Mr. Bush is no longer President as of the near future (say the next sixty days). It might be his sudden death from heart attack or stroke, it might be his resigning, either under a cloud or simply that he has burned out and chooses to step down; it might be that he is totally disabled by some tragedy. It matters not what – it’s a presupposition to this thread that for some random reason Mr. Bush is no longer President, and Mr. Cheney steps up to the Oval Office as provided for Constitutionally and in longstanding precedent.
Practically, and without partisan sniping to the greatest extent possible, what would you see as the defining characteristics of a Cheney Presidency? What Bush policies would he continue to pursue? What would he change, and in what ways?
The idea here is to speculate, based on what is publicly known about the man and his views and attitudes. No ill will is intended in this OP toward Mr. Bush; it’s merely hypothecated that Mr. Cheney has replaced him as President for reasons that need not be dealt with, in order to get to the gist of the question posed in the thread title.
I see very little changing. How many instances can you think of within the past four years of Shrub and Cheney really, seriously disagreeing with each other about any policy? How many instances where Bush supported a bill while Cheney opposed it? How many where Bush wanted one course of action on foreign policy while Cheney wanted a different one? They are two men of the same mind, with all available evidence pointing towards the conclusion that Shrub always takes Cheney’s advice. In terms of policy, then, nothing would change.
Business as usual – complete continuity, a little more articulate, maybe, not as much giggling and smirking, but more of the same with a less personable face. Some cynic might suggest that you are talking about replacing the puppet with the puppet master.
Publicly, the only one that comes to mind is the dust-up over gay marriage during the debates (Cheney favors it, but says the President sets Administration policy). Cheney has a reputation for being more discreet than most VPs (possibly because he has no political aspirations himself), but it’s hardly atypical for a VP to set aside his own beliefs and toe the line that his President draws.
This article suggests that the biggest difference between Bush and Cheney (at least in terms of their political abilities) is that Bush is an affable salesman, and Cheney is a gruff details man. Cheney is more of a CEO than a politician. For example:
This also suggests that Cheney might not place as high a priority on environmental regulation as the Bush.
Well, at least from the History Channels perspective in their Presidents series, Bush runs a pretty tight ship…and makes all the decisions. If you are implying that Bush is some kind of puppet.
Hm…what would it be like under Chaney? I actually don’t know myself. I’m unsure of Chaney’s stance on things like fiscal policy. Certainly I don’t see a radical change in our Iraq/WoT policies and I think Chaney is mainly in agreement with Bush on those. But Iraq and the WoT aren’t everything. Is Chaney an old style Conservative fiscally?
There might not be a change in direction – but it is possible that Cheney, being, as Age Quod Agis noted, a “CEO” where Bush is an “affable salesman,” might be less successful than Bush in selling his policies to the public and to Congress.
Also . . . a lot of people seem to think Bush has charisma. I’ve never heard anyone say that about Cheney. He has the charisma of a rotting dog carcass.
Cheney voted against making MLK day a holiday while he was in the house.
I recall someone (O’Niel, I think) quoted him as saying that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”, when someone was complaining about the fiscal impact of the second round of tax cuts.
The main difference between Cheney and Bush, I think is that Bush is a big gov’t conservative advocating no-child left behind, expanding medicare, etc. Cheney, at least back in his Congress days, was not (he voted against the creation of the dept. of education). It would be interesting to see if Cheney would stick to these beliefs and abandon the politically succsessful “compasionate conservatism” of Bush if he found himself president.
:rolleyes: That was a frickin’ Blackadder reference! One I would have expected most Dopers to get! Are we nerds, or are we nerds?
As I said in the referenced thread – and as I have said several times in other threads – we need much more liberal rules on this board – and especially in the GD forum – when it comes to wishing death on named individuals and/or groups. There are many, many circumstances – and especially here-and-now – where wishing death on people is perfectly legitimate, even inescapably relevant, political discourse! :mad:
Not that I’m actually wishing death on Bush, you understand. I do proudly and honorably wish all imaginable pain, suffering and humiliation upon him, in personal terms. But in political terms – Cheney would be a worse president in every conceivable respect save personal intelligence.
President Cheney’s first act would be to nominate a new vice president to be confirmed by the Senate. I think you’d see a cabinet shakeup, certainly there must be at least one that gets in Cheney’s hair (metaphorically speaking). Foreign policy would be much unchanged. In fiscal policy, I would expect that Cheney would be a bit more of a true fiscal conservative than Bush.
The neocon movement would suffer for it. As others have noted, Bush is a generally liked frontman. Cheney… well, he lacks the charisma Bush can be said to have by his admirerers. They wouldn’t be able to bully things around like they have been.
But on the other hand, I think Cheney would be a more “dangerous” man than Bush is.
He’d probably try to merge the U.S. with someplace really good, like Haiti. It would be just like his brilliant maneuver, when CEO of Haliburton, to acquire Dresser Industries, with all of its highly attractive asbestos liability. (Dresser was also selling stuff to Saddam Hussein as late as 2000). In short, Cheney likes to portray himself as the CEO type, but in real life, he proved to be remarkably inept at it. Sort of like GWB himself and a number of other officials in the adminstration. Josh Marshall referred to this as “the myth of Republican competence” in a wonderful article from 2001.
