Hearing recent talk about Dick Cheney being dropped from the 2004 ticket, I began to wonder why he was chosen to be the VP candidate in the first place.
Why not someone who was a better public speaker / had a higher profile / could bring his region’s electoral college votes etc?
I realise that he was the one doing the choosing, so to speak, as he led the VP selection committee. However, even if you subscribe to the notion of Cheney as “power behind the throne”, surely he could exercise his influence as an advisor etc, and let someone a bit more photogenic become the veep?
What’s the go? Let’s try to keep this out of GD as long as possible too.
I really don’t understand the antipathy towards Dick Cheney. Just what has he done to raise the ire of everyone? Halliburton? That’s a conspiracy theory. Because he’s a hawk? So is Bush, Rice, Wolfowitz, and just about everyone else in the Cabinet aside from Powell, and even he has his hawkish moments.
Why was Cheney picked? I think the main reason was because he has gravitas. Before 200, Cheney was one of the more respected politicians in the U.S. He served brilliantly in the first Bush administration, and was one of the architects of the first extremely successful Gulf War. Bush didn’t have foreign policy experience, and was trying to shake the image of being a lightweight. The best way to do that was to pick a heavyweight for VP, and Cheney was that in spades.
There were two reasons that GWB picked Dick Cheney: gravitas and loyalty.
The word that you kept hearing in the media in 2000 was “gravitas.” That is, a sense of seriousness. That’s what George W. Bush lacked most. As a rule, people liked him on a personal level, but many doubted his experience, his wisdom, his understanding of the way Washington works, his understanding of world affairs. And that’s where Dick Cheney came in. No, he’s not a charming guy, but he’d been White House Chief of Staff, he’d been Defense Secretary, and while his record as a Congressman and Cabinet member marked him as a hawkish conservative, he also seemed like a mild-mannered, thoughtful, cerebral individual. That seemed to make him a good counterbalance to a man that many people couldn’t quite take seriously.
GWB values loyalty in his staff more than anything else. He wanted a man he trusted and felt comfortable with. Cheney had been loyal to Bush’s father, and that counted for a lot.
The OP is quite right to note that Cheney wasn’t a huge vote-getter. After all, his two home states are Wyoming and Texas, states that would have gone Republican anyway. IF there’d been a potential nominee who’d have been sure to sway a probable Democratic state to a Republican state, Bush might well have chosen him. But really, there WASN’T anybody that charismatic or popular. Increasingly, red states stay red and blue states stay blue, and nobody is charismatic or popular enough to swing a state through his personal popularity alone.
Moreover, people usually overestimate the importance of a VP candidate on Election Day. Lloyd Bentsen commanded infinitely more respect in the South than Dan Quayle, but did a single Southern state support Michael Dukakis as a result? Nope.
So, my sense is, a presidential candidate’s best course of action is to shrug off electoral considerations (his Veep candidate isn’t likely to help OR hurt him in the general election) and pick soimeone he likes, respects, and thinks would make a good president, in the event of his death. That’s pretty much what GWB did in picking Dick Cheney.
Sam Stone, I think some of the antipathy might come from the fact that as Vice President, he is presumed to have more power and influence than the others. If one is going to characterise any particular figure in an administration as being the “source of evil”, it’s always going to be the most senior one after the leader.
It’s a bit like the evil Grand Vizier / evil Cardinal / evil Minister characters in various stories. It catches the imagination better.
I can only answer that question by giving my personal feeling. The Vice President is there for one reason and one reason only. We should be concerned if the President has a hang nail, but the Vice President should be in perfect health, otherwise he is no good for his prime purpose. He should pick up some of the slack by going to funerals in foreign countries and break ties in the Senate, but that’s it. He doesn’t need to be making decisions for the President. He might disappear for months at a time, but not because we are more afraid he will get assassinated than the President. There is not one damn thing about the man that says “Vice President”.
Let’s not have a debate about whether Cheney is a bad person or a bad Vice President or all the reasons people might think he is. Let’s stick to facts about how the selection process worked in 2000 and what factors were considered.
I’m interested in why quite a few of his cabinet appoints occured. Why John Ashcroft for Attorney General, didn’t he just lose an election to a dead man in his state?
Sibyl, I believe that at the time, Ashcroft was said to be a sop to the social conservatives of the party, the religious right. He had a high profile, due to his Senate race and was available.
I don’t like the guy myself, but don’t think the lost-to-a-dead-guy thing is something to hit him with. Surely one is more likely to lose to a dead guy, given the sympathy vote and so on.
I don’t think Cheney or Lieberman made sense. Cheney had at least one thing going for him: He had been in government service for so long, there were no skeletons in his closet. I think Bush may have thought that he wanted to make sure there was no Quayle skeletons and the VP wouldn’t hurt him.
In some positions, popular electability is a poor predictor of how well someone will do the job. (Also, Ashcroft stopped campaigning out of respect to Carnahan, which in retrospect was a mistake.)
IIRC, Ashcroft was at one time a law prof and wrote some law books. But was that the reason? Unless someone here was in on the transition teams and can clue us into the deliberations, we’re just speculating.
He lost to Mel Carnahan’s wife, Jean in 2000. It was decided she’d take over the office until the next election if “he” won, and there was a HUGE sympathy vote.
However, when they held a proper election in 2002, the voters took things more seriously and she lost soundly to Jim Talent.