A Different Way of Viewing Cheney's Historical Context
Let me try and break the apparent logjam between Jake, Paul and Bart. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Cheney is a singular figure or whether other people in the administration resisted his whims. Maybe a better way of contextualizing Cheney arrives by asking whether/which previous government officers were as able to enact their agendas as Cheney was.
I'll be clear I'm not a historian. And for purposes of this discussion we're pretty much eliding the question of Bush's relationship to Cheney, which isn't an insignificant consideration. But I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who got his way more often and more thoroughly than Cheney since Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to late 1966. Like Johnson, Cheney knew the institutional obstacles to his agenda, and he knew their fracture points: how to circumvent and undermine the CIA; how to manipulate the GOP congressional leadership; when to appease, for instance, the Saudis and when to flout them.
Cheney's overstretch, and Bush's, is -- like LBJ's -- a consequence of too much political success. Unlike LBJ, Bush and Cheney didn't come into office with a decisive electoral victory to squander, but they governed as if they did. And like with Johnson, much of the wreckage of the Republican Party is due to Bush and Cheney taking their ideological governing instincts to their extremes. Neither ever pretended to be a small-government conservative (well, maybe Cheney did, while in the House), but both were determined to push executive power to the breaking point for conservative goals. Liberals post-LBJ went into a long wilderness while they tried to figure out just where they went wrong -- even as Democrats kept winning congressional races for political and not ideological reasons -- and I suspect conservatives, thanks in large part to Cheney, are in for something similar.
Cheney certainly had help reconfiguring the Executive branch to resemble something like the adminstrative apparatus of a Dark Ages warlord, both in centralization of power and violent exercise of it; there was Rumsfeld, the Ashcroft/Gonzales succession at Justice, and the vast neocon cabal in the Pentagon and foreign policy sector, just to name a few.
What made Cheney unique, to me, is that he was the most powerful Vice President in the country's history. True: In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, Johnson accumulated and used some rich political capital, accomplishing, among other things, the passage of the signature Civil Rights and voting acts of 1964 and '65, and the Great Society and War on Poverty programs. But he did so as President. The closest comparison to Cheney in the American experience is Al Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti, who kept the Chicago mobster's empire running - through the power he'd accrued as underling - while Capone was imprisoned. As Vice President, Cheney functioned, at least for awhile, as an Executive branch unto himself. Unfortunately for us, now, this was in a period critical to the present and future integrity of the country.
November 20, 2008 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
John Bolton had an interesting interview with Jon Stewart a while ago that brought out a lot of interesting points about this administration's governing philosophy (yes I know it's a comedy show, but the line between reality and satire these days is almost unfindable).
Also, regarding the parallels with LBJ--Sam Tanenhaus drew the exact same comparison a while ago at an AEI talk (interesting analysis by Jim Sleeper here on TPM). Also liked Tanenhaus's recent NYTimes piece.
Good luck in the wilderness, GOP. I suggest you come back when you've made friends with the "reality based community." (I know they have "New Class" cooties, but you kinda need them to govern.)
November 20, 2008 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Cheney stands at the front of a line of people whose goal was to dislocate and then remove the apparatus of government from the interests of the governed. (It happened that the Republican party was the most convenient base for this operation.)
Cheney and a group of his cohorts redefined "American Interests" as "Our Interests," increasingly viewing votes as the fuel of power and voters as the means of production. Or it might be more correct to say that they ditched genuine American values and substituted a thin gruel of naked greed, convenient platitudes and open divisions in their place.
Call them NeoCons, call them Straussians, whatever, but they are the guys who decided that what was good for them was just fine for everybody, which is not exactly what the rest of us think of as democracy.
Nobody before dared to try this in America with the kind of snarling sense of entitlement that Cheney displayed. That's his context.
November 20, 2008 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
When you can be amongst the legislative branch and openly tell a Congressman who happens to not agree with you to "Go f***yourself," or when asked on national television about the nation's opinion about your war and, of course about the activities of your administration and all you can do is smirk and respond: "So?"
That tells you all you need to know about that disgrace of a man and the thoughts that guide him.
November 21, 2008 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink