March
23, 2005
Cheney Envy, 2008
By Lawrence
Kudlow
With a smile,
following our interview on CNBC last week, Vice President Dick
Cheney said, “That was a trick question.” I responded,
also with a smile, “That’s why I asked it, sir.”
What was
the question? Simply this: “If the president asked you,
would you reconsider your door closing on a race in 2008?”
Here’s
Cheney’s answer:
“I've
made it very clear, Larry, that my tour here is tied to [George
W. Bush]. I agree[d] to come back to government. I’ve
had a great 25-year career. He persuaded me to come back after
eight years in the private sector. I’ve loved it -- hadn’t
regretted it for a minute -- but I’m here to serve him
as long as he serves. … I think if I were a candidate,
then you’d begin to get the traditional divisions …
inside the West Wing, the president headed down one road and
the vice president worried about how he’s being received
in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the Iowa caucuses four years hence. It
doesn’t work that way … It’s worked very well
for us. I’m absolutely committed to doing everything I
can to help him succeed, but I’m also committed four years
from now. I don’t plan to be here. I’m going to
be out on the road or back with my grandkids or fishing streams
I’ve not yet fished.”
Does Cheney
leave the door open just a teensy bit for a 2008 run? The sentence
arguing for this option is, “He persuaded me to come back
after eight years in the private sector.” Could Cheney be
persuaded again? I wish it were possible. But Cheney does seem
set on casting his fly rod four years from now.
That’s
a pity. During the interview I brought up a prescient and potentially
prophetic column in the Wall Street Journal by Leslie
Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations. In it, he coined a new
term: Cheney envy. You have to be a special sort of vice president
to earn such praise. Cheney, of course, has been instrumental
in promoting freedom and democracy abroad, but he’s also
been a key player in selling supply-side tax cuts, personal savings
accounts for Social Security, legal-abuse tort reform, energy
reform, and other market-oriented policies at home. His partnership
with President Bush is legion. And the scope of their transformational
reform administration is itself almost unsurpassed. In the last
hundred years, only the FDR reforms have been greater.
Ironically,
it is precisely the FDR New Deal reforms that Bush and Cheney
are attempting to reconstruct. They want the New Deal to fit a
21st century paradigm that substitutes free-market choice and
personal responsibility for Roosevelt’s Depression-era over-regulated
capitalism.
But when
you see leading Republican Senators and House members move off
the reservation of personal-account Social Security reform --
when you see them flinch on even the mildest budget restraints
for overspending entitlements -- you wonder if the Bush-Cheney
reform-legacy will stand the test of time.
There is
a disappointing parallel here. George H. W. Bush was elected to
a third Reagan term to guard the Gipper’s legacy of tax-rate
cuts, deregulation, and the exportation of political and economic
freedom abroad. But Papa Bush disappointed by raising taxes at
home and doing business with dictators overseas. Realism trumped
idealism on foreign policy. Seeing Saddam Hussein retain power
in Baghdad was the worst example of this.
It is highly
doubtful that a President Cheney would repeat such errors in a
third W. term. First off, Cheney’s basic belief system has
been set in stone for more than three decades. Second, he is a
highly effective communicator, having trounced Joe Lieberman and
John Edwards during the vice presidential debates. Third, Cheney
possesses one of the widest and deepest knowledge-bases of government
policy of anyone in Washington today. His ability to get things
done -- often amidst fractious debates on domestic and international
policy -- is well documented.
This is the
true source of Cheney envy. It has frequently been observed that
the Republicans have all the good ideas nowadays and that the
Democrats have virtually none. But you’d be correct if you
said Bush and Cheney not only generated these ideas, but also
put them into action.
Does anyone
seriously doubt that Cheney is the most qualified person, in either
party, to be our next president? Any number of early Republican
hopefuls -- Frist, Allen, Giuliani, McCain, Romney -- would look
good riding the bus with Cheney in a few years. The Cheney for
President bus, that is.
I hope President
Bush asks Vice President Cheney to succeed him. For four more
years.
Lawrence
Kudlow is a former Reagan economic advisor, a syndicated columnist,
and the co-host of CNBC's Kudlow
& Company.
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