Matt Yglesias

Cheney is Unpopular, Not “Polarizing”

An interesting Politico piece about how folks charged with Republican Party politics in the real world aren’t so thrilled with the Newt/Cheney Comeback Tour is far too kind about public’s view of Dick Cheney:

After a one-two punch from Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, House Minority Leader John Boehner and other Republican lawmakers worry that their party has overplayed its hand on Nancy Pelosi.

The Republicans’ fear: Gingrich’s call for Pelosi’s ouster has set an unattainable goal, and Cheney’s jabs at her during a speech Thursday will allow Democrats to portray the controversy as a partisan attack by one of the GOP’s most polarizing figures.

“If the story becomes about us and not her, it’s a problem for us,” said a senior Republican lawmaker.

When I think of a “polarizing” figure, I think of someone about whom the public has strong, but closely divided feelings. Like if you were at 45 percent “strongly favorable” and 45 percent “strongly unfavorable” with only a few people in the middle. Cheney is just unpopular:

That’s different, I think, from being polarizing. And note that the poll from which I’ve taken that lower-than-Cuba favorablerating for Cheney gave him an unusually high rating. It’s possible that strident public advocacy of torture and law breaking has, in fact, raised his popularity to within spitting distance of an impoverished Communist dictatorship. But it’s also possible that that poll was an outlier and that Cheney’s true favorable rating is considerably lower.

Quote of the Day

Benjy Sarlin, over email: “Dick Cheney, who brought us the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation methods,’ is currently railing against those who use ‘euphemisms’ to obscure the debate over national security.”

Cheney Tortures, Lies About Torture

It is, of course, borderline treasonous to suggest that anyone would mislead anyone about their barbaric and illegal torture activities:

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn’t true.

Cheney’s 2004 comments to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News were largely overlooked at the time. However, they appear to substantiate recent reports that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prison camps were ordered to find evidence of alleged cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship.

And this is the practical problem with torture. If you know what you want people to say, you can torture them into saying it. But that’s not a process that actually enhances the quantity of accurate information in your possession.

The Cheney Phase

In his debut column, Ross Douthat laments that Dick Cheney didn’t throw his hat into the 2008 ring, because a Cheney candidacy would have left conservative reformers a stronger hand today:

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: >a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think this is a clever thought experiment, but I doubt that it’s literally true. I think the reality is that governing necessarily involves compromises. But fans don’t like to see the politicians they support compromising. However, as long as the politicians in question are winning it all seems forgivable and you focus on the aspects of the agenda that you support. But when a strategy that entails some compromise leads you to defeat, you necessarily see a backlash from the base which insists that greater purity could have carried the day. I’m fairly certain this impulse would have existed no matter who the Republican standard-bearer had been in 2008.

A further observation would be that while I don’t cherish the thought of conservative purism, one complicating factor for the reform camp is that it’s not true that moderation is always the path to political victory. The Democratic Party’s basic 2008 positioning was considerably to the left of its 2004 positioning on most issues—foreign policy, health care, climate change, civil liberties, you name it—but times had changed and it worked. Meanwhile, though “the base” is always very important in primary elections, the specific electoral system in use in GOP presidential primaries makes it very possible for a candidate who’s not-so-popular with the base to win the nomination.

The noteworthy thing about 2008 is that even though two mavericky candidates (McCain and Huckabee) did well, as did one guy with a moderate record (Mitt Romney), the three of them together came up with about zero interesting, innovative, or sound policy ideas. I think this paucity of real ideas—as opposed to ideas about the need for ideas—is, rather than historical bad luck in not having a Cheney ‘08 campaign to point to as a cautionary tale—the bigger problem for reform conservatism.

Same As the Old Cheney

Lately Josh Marshall’s been kicking around the question of how Dick Cheney, chief of staff to Gerald Ford and defense secretary to George H.W. Bush, turned into the Dick Cheney, sociopath and vice president, that we all know and despise.

This is an interesting question. But I think the preponderance of the evidence suggests that he didn’t really change that much. The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance was a pretty radical document. It came out of an office Dick Cheney supervised, and was most directly done by Paul Wolfowitz working with some other neocon subordinates who came back in the W. Bush DOD. But when it leaked, the president disavowed it.

By 2001, Cheney had acquired a more powerful position and he had a new boss who was dumber and less moral than his father. But on top of that, the United States had grown accustomed to a world in which there was little objective constraint on its power, and then 9/11 made the public much more receptive to military aggression than it had previously been. Put that together with the fact that Cheney’s baseline views had long tended toward the militaristic and slightly insane, and it doesn’t seem so mysterious.

Axelrod vs. Cheney

Neat video courtesy of ThinkProgress of David Axelrod hitting back against Dick Cheney’s criticisms of the Obama administration:

This leads Kevin Drum to remark:

I’ve been mulling this ever since Cheney started spouting off a few weeks ago, and I still haven’t really made up my mind about it. Does an outgoing administration owe an incoming one silence? I don’t think that’s always been the case (historians please correct me here if I’m wrong), and I wonder if it really should be. Sure, it would be unseemly for ex-presidents and their staffs to engage in partisan feeding frenzies after they leave office, but is there really any reason why they should all take vows of silence? If Cheney thinks torture and warrantless wiretapping are vital to the nation’s security, then maybe he should go ahead and say so. Why not?

I think the “don’t criticize your successor” rule only makes sense as prudential advice. Not only is Dick Cheney not a credible messenger, but him speaking out looks like sour grapes and it’s all vaguely absurd. The prudent ex-president or ex-veep tries to shift into high-minded elder statesman terrain rather than slumming it à la Cheney.

But as a substantive rule, a “keep quiet” doctrine wouldn’t make sense. It was a good thing that Al Gore brought the credibility and perspective he had as a former Vice President to bear and criticized the invasion of Iraq. And even though I tend not to agree with Cheney on the merits of issues, there’s no denying that he’s been able to look at these things up close so if he thinks it’s important for him to speak out I have no procedural objection to that. It’s just that you’d have to be pretty dumb to actually think it makes sense to take advice from a guy with Cheney’s record.

Republicans Push Back Against Cheney Legacy Tour

Recently we’ve heard an awful lot from Dick Cheney, considering that widely loathed former Vice Presidents tend to lay low. Turns out some Republicans aren’t thrilled with the trend:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input. [...] Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”

I’m not sure that voting no on everything and calling for a spending freeze really qualifies as “rebuilding” but I suppose recognizing that people don’t like Dick Cheney shows that we’re all living in a common universe.

Rick Klein: Leave Dick Cheney Alooooooone

Asked about Dick Cheney’s ridiculous Sunday remarks just now, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was appropriately dismissive: “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy,” he said, so they had to bring out “the next most powerful member of the Republican cabal.” The Note’s Rick Klein is getting the vapors:

Gibbs on Chney critique: “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy.” wow — we’re talking about the former vice president here

The way I look at it, the idea of respectful debate has no real meaning unless you actually deny respect to someone. Cheney seems like a good candidate.

The Cheney Factor

If I were Dick Cheney, I’d be laying low thanking my lucky stars that I’m not on trial for war crimes not going on television to talk smack about the new administration. But talking smack it is. It’s really remarkable when you think about it that anyone would listen to Cheney on the subject of national security. His administration was by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering Americans. Also by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering NATO allies. And the military action his administration pursued in response to the terrorist attack we suffered under their watch has come to be mired in problems, teetering on the brink of failure, almost entirely thanks to a second—but completely unnecessary—war his administration chose to undertake in favor of successfully completing the first one.

Meanwhile, during this time hostile nations such as North Korea and Iran have become bigger proliferation threats than ever!