I used to think of Cheney as Bush’s human training wheels: a helpful, steadying influence who would be jettisoned once the new president got his balance. I thought that Bush had picked his running mate to reassure the country and would want to show his independence from him at the earliest possible moment.
I don’t think that anymore. Bush not only believes in delegating responsibility, he believes in doing it permanently. It’s not just that the president doesn’t know all the details, he has no desire to learn all the details. Bush is perfectly comfortable being seen relying on the help of others. So as issues accumulate, so do the messages in the vice president’s e-mail.
Cheney is doing more political chores than is generally known, on the Hill and in the country. His expanding brief now includes not only his high-profile energy task force, but a government-wide drive to protect against terrorist attack. Urgent challenges in foreign policy-from selling a new theory of missile defense to dealing with the United Nations-are drawing Cheney even closer to George Bush’s side as mentor, adviser and friend.
Is this a good thing for Bush? Well, Cheney is an administrative master, a world traveler, a fixture among Republican insiders for a quarter century. But he is also a man with firm views, an inability to suffer fools in a city full of them and an impatience with the rituals of public persuasion. He embodies the best and worst of corporate caricature: serious, bottom-line, cold-blooded.
That’s why most of his work is done offstage. While Bush presides over T-ball on the South Lawn, Cheney and his number crunchers prepare the final language of the energy plan the administration will unveil next week. While Bush travels the country campaign-style, Cheney makes quiet phone calls and journeys to the Capitol for lengthy strategy sessions with Republicans.
Politically, Cheney is more active behind the scenes than is generally realized. According to Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who chairs the GOP’s Senate campaign committee, the vice president is smack in the middle of efforts to recruit candidates to run for Congress next year. “He’s making lots of calls,” Frist told me. One was to Norm Coleman, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., who wanted to run for governor. Cheney (and Bush) have been trying to talk him into running for the Senate instead. “A call from Cheney matters,” said Frist.
Cheney brought to the energy task force a lifetime of experience in government and business, and a very firmly held view: that only massive increase in production can solve the problem. The Bush-Cheney team, having polled and focus-grouped the issue, know that the American people want it both ways: they think they have a God-given right to cheap energy of all kinds and to unobstructed ocean views. But White House strategists also know they have to pay as much homage as it can to the ideal of conservation.
Cheney’s not their man to do it. He’s all for saving energy, but he feels it’s his duty to stress what he sees as a less-accommodating truth. “There’s this notion that, somehow, we can conserve our way out of our problems,” he says with a touch of impatience in his voice. “In my mind, that just voids making choices.”
He’s used tougher language in private, I’ve been told. At a strategy session with Republican senators, he recounted his experiences a quarter century ago in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Some GOP senators worried aloud that the White House plan would be all-to-easy to portray as a pigout of profits for Big Energy. What could be done to limit pump prices or electric bills? Cheney’s answer, according to one participant: nothing. He’d been around when the Republicans had tried to impose wage and price controls. They didn’t work then, Cheney said, and certainly would not work now.
The plan is largely Cheney’s, but he isn’t the man to sell it. He’s oblivious to the power of personal witness in the political Age of Oprah. The president, as it happens, uses the latest energy-saving technology at his new ranch in Texas. The White House has been bragging happily about it. I asked Cheney if he’d done anything similar in his own office, or perhaps at his residence.
The question didn’t compute. Cheney gave me a puzzled look, then a statistical mini-lecture. “Our consumption of electricity per unit of output is down 60 percent since 1970,” he said. (In fact, I later learned, the residence uses a state-of-the-art heating and cooling system.) That very day Bush was ordering thermostats in California federal buildings turned up to 78 degrees. I asked Cheney if he’s done the same in his own office. That drew another blank stare. “I don’t even set the thermostat,” he said. “I don’t have any idea.”
Cheney is a big-think, big-system guy. That’s one reason why Bush has just put him in charge of bringing order to the sprawling set of federal programs that are supposed to prevent-and respond to-domestic terrorist threats. Responsibility is scattered among a dozen agencies; only Cheney could figure out how to rationalize them. “It’s a complete bureaucratic mess,” said Joe Allbaugh, the longtime Bush aide who now heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will run the consolidated program.
As if that weren’t enough, Cheney is overseeing a White House task force on global warming-due to report in a couple of months. And of course he’s always standing ready to rush to the Hill for tie-breaking votes in the 50-50 Senate, or down the West Wing’s narrow hallways to the Oval Office. Watching his diet, exercising faithfully, he looks leaner and far more fit than he did a few months ago. “Life agrees with me,” he said simply. And it’s evidently true: for Dick Cheney, accumulating power is a healthy thing.
