WASHINGTON — Vice presidents typically fade away quietly. Not Dick Cheney.
Some people want him to be quiet. Others are cheering the public- relations tour he began halfway through President Barack Obama’s first 100 days, defending the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation tactics and other anti-terrorism policies.
Either way, Cheney refuses to be a has-been.
When Obama released memos detailing Bush-era interrogation techniques and wouldn’t completely rule out prosecuting or disciplining former Bush administration officials, Cheney couldn’t stay silent.
“It wasn’t like on Jan. 21, he planned that he was going to speak out in this way,” said Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a former State Department official. “It was driven by events, and I think he will continue to do it if he feels it’s important to the public debate.”
The Cheney camp says it’s not about politics.
In Washington, however, everything is about politics, and Cheney’s decision to make his case on talk shows and deliver speeches at think tanks cuts both ways. His message fires up conservatives but also rallies Democratic opponents who don’t miss an opportunity to portray the unpopular Cheney as the lead spokesman of the Republican Party.
“I would think the Republicans ought to be shy in using him as their front,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He dismisses Cheney’s appearances as if they were old TV reruns.
Even some prominent Republicans aren’t too happy about Cheney’s message.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the nation’s first Homeland Security chief, was asked whether he agreed with Cheney’s assertion that the Obama administration has made the country less safe. “I do not,” Ridge said.
Cheney supporters say the former vice president has received an outpouring of supportive e-mails, calls and comments from the military community, the families of those who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and from people at the CIA, which helped carry out the interrogation program.
His backers claim Cheney is having an impact. They point to Obama’s move to reverse himself and fight the court-ordered release of prisoner abuse photos and his decision to revive military tribunals for some terrorism suspects, although he is revamping how that system would work.
They also cite the Democratic- controlled Senate’s vote to deny Obama $80 million to close the prison camp in eight months, as the president promised.
“It’s nothing personal. It’s nothing political. It’s not legacy,” said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin, who has known Cheney for three decades. “There’s one and only one thing that’s animating and motivating his advocacy, and that’s Obama’s behavior relative to these security policies — the release of the legal memos and the open-endedness of the potential prosecution of the intelligence gatherers or the lawyers.”
Matalin said Cheney wouldn’t stop talking even if GOP leaders asked him to.
Cheney, 68, has always been straightforward. But when he walked in President George W. Bush’s shadow, he had to temper his public remarks, stay on the White House message. He could manipulate the levers of powers behind the scenes.
Out of office, he has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews to insert himself in the public debate — and not only on national security.
In his first television interview after leaving office, just 54 days after Obama was sworn in, Cheney said that it’s not fair to blame the economic woes on the Bush administration. He said it was a global financial problem that he feared the new administration could use to justify a massive expansion in the government and meddling in the private sector.
“I don’t know if this is some sort of psychological liberation,” said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who has written extensively on the vice presidency.
“Now he can come out of the undisclosed locations. He’s his own man again. He’s free from those restraints that are inherent in being vice president — even if you are the most powerful vice president in history.”
At the White House on Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said it appears that Cheney’s latest speech was an extension of the same argument that occurred “inside these walls” for many years during the administration in which he served for eight years.
