Greetings Bart. . .and very much look forward to being back tomorrow when I'll weigh in on your must read book for those wishing to understand the core sculpting force of the Bush years.

But Jacob Heilbrunn suggested that I wrote a piece saying Biden should learn from Cheney. Actually, I think that would be a bad idea.

I didn't say Biden -- I said Obama.

Here's the intro to my post which already got quite a few razzled for mentioning Dick Cheney and Barack Obama in the same headline. So let's not add Biden just yet.

From the blog post:

Barack Obama should keep his smile and not adopt the scowl that Vice President Richard Cheney often deployed to tenderize his victims, but he should pay careful attention to the way that Cheney animated hundreds of followers to move the Cheney agenda across the national security bureaucracy.

If one were to score "influence" within the G.W. Bush administration, Cheney would get top prize -- higher than G.W. Bush himself.

No one knows how the incumbent President Bush makes decisions. He's not consistent. He holds his cards close -- and sometimes tilts one way, sometimes another. Swagger is the defining characteristic of Bush's decisions -- not necessarily logic, or at least not a logical line that I can discern.

Condoleezza Rice has a few followers who do understand her approach to problems -- but she never worked to build a significant following.

Colin Powell, who advised caution and a review of every scenario in responding to a serious challenges, tended to matter when he was in the room -- and not, when he wasn't.

But as I have written previously and as Barton Gellman chronicles in his important new book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Cheney succeeded in not only getting people loyal and beholden to him appointed throughout the vast wings of the country's national security and intelligence bureaucracies, he and his close team of David Addington, Scooter Libby and John Hannah conveyed a template for approaching the world and agitating for an expansion of Executive Branch authority in comparison to other branches of government.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note