Does making the decisions on what the Prez gets to decided upon make Chaney more powerful than the Prez? Does it absolve Bush of blame if a decision he makes is bad if he wasn’t given all the real options?
Scores of interviews with advisers to the president and vice president, as well as with other senior officials throughout the government, offer a backstage view of how the Bush White House operates. The president is “the decider,” as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices.
Cheney led a group that winnowed the president’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches — and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI — over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate political corruption in Congress.
And it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. He shaped and pushed through Bush’s tax cuts, blunting the influence of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a longtime friend, and of Cabinet rivals he had played a principal role in selecting. He managed to overcome the president’s “compassionate conservative” resistance to multiple breaks for the wealthy. He even orchestrated a decision to let a GOP senator switch parties — giving control of the chamber to Democrats — rather than meet the senator’s demand for billions of dollars in new spending.
[Former Army secretary John O. Marsh Jr. said,] “He holds the view, as do I, that the vice president should be the chief of staff in effect, that everything should run through his office.”
In Bush, Cheney found the perfect partner. The president’s willingness to delegate left plenty of room for his more detail-oriented vice president.
It is well known that Cheney is usually the last to speak to the president before Bush makes a decision. Less so is his role, to a degree unmatched by his predecessors, in steering debate by weighing in at the lower-level meetings where proposals are born and die.
This is about the office of the Vice President opperating as is usually does. This is part of the power of the VP office. Bush’s hands off views and Cheney’s hands on interest does seem like a good match, I just wonder who thought the pairing up. I’m a little interest and more than a little worried to see what these two have in mind for their last year in office. You can all rest assured they dont plan to be quiet in that time.
In the picture above, Lincoln seems not too amused.
Gellman gives an excellent interview on Charlie Rose last night/repeated. Actually he gives more credit to Bush than the quotes above do. I don’t see any “real big” issue here. Bush is responsible for what he does. How he arrives at those decisions is a very secondary issue. I care about as much about Cheney’s power as I do about pillow talk with the Mrs.
That of course reminds me of the precedent joke here. “I make all the big decisions in this family. The misses only decides what the big issues are.”
FRONTLINE did a story on him that’s a pretty good watch.
#3 – Bush is responsible for what he does.
That line is only true depending on how you decide to read it.
The picture reminded me of a joke. Here goes:
Two inmates were talking to each other. The first one was imprisoned because he had stolen a cow and the other one cause he had stolen a watch. So they were talking and the first one says: What’s the time, pal?
And the other one goes: Time to milk the cow dude! rofl
And when Gore was President, this was viewed with praise, and see how ready he is to become President by himself. Now it’s all sinister.
I’ll grant you that Clinton seemed to be setting Gore up for a fall if one of the campaign finance scandals went south on him, but media team Democrat kept that from happening.
“Does making the decisions on what the Prez gets to decided upon make Chaney more powerful than the Prez? Does it absolve Bush of blame if a decision he makes is bad if he wasn’t given all the real options?”
The real question is: With the presidents approval rating in the shitter, what can we do to take some of the blame off of him?
“it was Cheney who served as the guardian of conservative orthodoxy on budget and tax matters. ”
– in which case, he has utterly failed. Most conservatives agree that Bush is the least conservative president the country has seen.
– as for Cheney deciding what “the decider” gets to decide – who made the decision to not veto any legislation during the first term? The only difference between Bush and rubber stamp is that the rubber stamp wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.
Rubber Stamp/Cheney ’08 !
#9
“- in which case, he has utterly failed. Most conservatives agree that Bush is the least conservative president the country has seen.”
Then how come everything he wanted to be done was approved by the Republican senators/congressfolk?
Clinton and Gore left the white house in 2001, remember? :-/
5–what do you mean?
of course Cheney is still responsible for what he does too or is that subject to the same caution?
You can delegate authority, but not responsibility. Help me out.
#7 – I’ll grant you that Clinton seemed to be setting Gore up for a fall if one of the campaign finance scandals went south on him, but media team Democrat kept that from happening.
What color is the sky in your world…?
It is amazing. I lived through the same 8 years as everybody else. Wasn’t that a prosperous era for you too? I’m amazed by the fact that there are still people who can’t admit what a great president Clinton was.
#9 – – in which case, he has utterly failed. Most conservatives agree that Bush is the least conservative president the country has seen.
He certainly fails to embody traditional conservative values… but if he isn’t a conservative, what is he? He sure as hell isn’t a liberal.
#12 – It’s a comment about semantics… You know… Bush “taking” responsibility… I’m not really contradicting anything you meant (which I gathered from context), just saying you could read that line another way.
Is this like how Dvorak decided for his editors that there should be no iPhone stories this week?
Yes it was a prosperous era, especially the second term. What does that have to do with campaign finance scandals? OK, maybe Nixon doesn’t get forced out of office if the economy doesn’t go into recession, but that doesn’t make it right. I can give a little leeway, as sometimes corruption is needed to get through an unwieldy bureaucracy, but the attitude you’re expressing is surprising. So if unemployment were a few points lower, and wages a dollar an hour higher, then you’d give George Bush a pass?
14==Thanks, I missed that totally. I don’t see any “special facts” that make anything Bush has done not his responsibility. I do agree he consciously and pathetically often tries to avoid taking responsibility.
Not much press coverage. Bush constantly stays in the background saying “let the investigations go forward” when IN FACT he has executive (responsibility) to have prevented/corrected the error to begin with.
Recall all the bitching about the money wasted trying to get Clinton to tell the truth. Same with BushCo except no complaints from the media.
Always a tangential argument, but our media really is not doing its job.
How is he the least conservative? I would say Richard Nixon presided over a bigger expansion of the regulatory state, and he threw Taiwan out of the UN to boot. On the other hand, George Bush rolled back half of Clinton’s tax increase. Bush isn’t the most conservative, and maybe not even conservative, but conservatives don’t make such idiotic claims, although with the current immigration bill, maybe they’ll start.
#16 – No… But I don’t think there’s any fire to the Clinton smoke… It was smear from day one and I have to admire I man who managed to be so overwhelmingly successful as a President, and leave office with a 70% approval rating despite being the target of 6 year long Republican witchhunt lead by Ken Starr (the most partisan and vitriolic jack-ass they could muster up) and having been through an impeachment.
As far as I am concerned, Clinton is a political bad-ass, and may actually be superhuman.
Bush on the other hand, even he weren’t corrupt, isn’t even remotely qualified to be President. In fact, I’d think twice before hiring him as a regional manager for a group of Family Dollar stores.
Yeah 25 people indicted, 19 convicted, 79 taking the 5th, so you know there’s no fire. But at least you allow for the possibility that Bush isn’t corrupt.
>>On the other hand, George Bush rolled back half of Clinton’s
>>tax increase.
Yeah, but he only rolled back the 1/2 of the taxes that applied to the obscenely wealthy. The rest of us just got fucked. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
People seem to equate approval ratings to success or competence. I dont give a damn what Clinton’s approval ratings were when he left office, hes gone either way. Also, Clinton employed a concerted effort to unnerve as few people as he could so as not to hurt his ratings. His image was his God and all his actions were tailored accordingly. If this is anyone definition of a good leader then screw that leader and that person both. Bush, while argueably ignorant, imcompetent, ect has a different view of governship, namely, he doesnt care if the opinion is against his objective. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, but let no one doubt that it takes far more (insert strong attribute here) than Clinton’s method did. I hope Bush and Clinton share the same general area of hell.
hold the phone — i thought cheney wasn’t a part of the executive branch oft the govn’t — how could this be?
man i can’t wait till 1/20/09 when we can start cleaning up this mess.
Clinton received the benefit of the dot-com boom. That drove the economy far more than any of Clinton’s policies. The economy was already slowing down when he left office, before GW even got in. Clinton is/was a scary good politician – as a President, not so much. He had an amazing teflon jacket, probably better than Reagan’s.
23–Eisenhower didn’t think so either. See below for a good read on VP’s
http://tinyurl.com/34r36v
Meanwhile, what is the proper action of any elected official==to “basically” implement the peoples will as best as can be determined (((–ie Clinton))) or to think one is beyond input and act as one wishes like a dictator for the elected term (((–ie BushCo))).
“Leadership” is a very sloppy concept brandished by the spinmeisters. If you experience a positive kneejerk to any appeal to that word—-stop it.
Ricard Cheney ’08 !
#25
You are touching on a core question about politicians in republics: do the representatives do what is best or what the people want? There is no single answer and it may change from issue to issue. You can’t purely placate the will of the masses because they can be easily swayed by gossip, rumor and ignorance. The masses generally don’t know all sides of the issue. On the other hand, you can’t have someone just do whatever they feel is “best” even if it is against the will of the people because eventually the people will be rebel (or throw you out of office.)
Clinton took “listening to the masses” to the extreme. Every decision was done by approval polls. Bush has taken the “do what I think is right” to an extreme. Both suck because going the extreme in either direction is a recipe for disaster.
Without the dot com boom, Clinton’s “prosperous years” would have been ordinary at best. Thus, I consider Clinton and Bush to both be average Presidents: worse than half and better than half.
27–We basically agree but maybe with an important distinction.
“You are touching on a core question about politicians in republics: do the representatives do what is best or what the people want?”
What is “best” is arguable. What the people want is fairly measurable. And to that end, what the people want (which is fairly measurable) is most often the best. Not always, just most often.
See “The Wisdom of Crowds”
http://tinyurl.com/mbmnb
Those who call Bush “the most conservative President” have no sense of history. Nixon wasn’t a conservative. Neither were Raygun or Shrub the First. Since the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal, government has been implanted into our daily lives. In turn, that has made America the great nation she is.
Cheney is still an asshole.
Clinton and campaign finance have nothing to do with this thread unless Bush & Cheney’s antics embarrass you and you need a smoke screen.
#28, bobbo, interesting article. But one thing really stands out:
Surowiecki studies situations (such as rational bubbles) in which the crowd produces very bad judgment, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because (in one way or another) the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently.
Does this sound like the avg. person being spoon fed his info from the national media?