COMMENT
VEEP DOO-DOO
Issue of 2006-03-13
Posted 2006-03-06
According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the “favorability” rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the “Daily Show” star’s going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” When King barked out the number—“Cheney eighteen per cent”—Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum.
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That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President’s lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially.
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As some conservatives noted, no one died at Armstrong, unlike at Chappaquiddick in 1969 (or Weehawken in 1804). As no conservatives noted, unlike at the Watergate, no one at the ranch set out to commit a standard-issue crime; unlike in the Iran-Contra case, no one traded arms for hostages, illegally funded foreign guerrillas, or lied to Congress. A trivial offense, if offense it was, was followed by an outsized, politically tinged overreaction. In this sense, the Armstrong gunplay was more like the Clinton-Lewinsky business, although the overreactions were on different scales: a weeklong cable-TV brouhaha versus a yearlong vendetta featuring prosecutorial skulduggery, the expenditure of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and the culminating grotesquerie of impeachment and acquittal.
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Quoting “senior G.O.P. sources,” Insight, an obscure but well-connected Washington “news magazine,” asserted last week that Cheney will “probably” be eased into retirement after November’s congressional elections. That seems far-fetched. Bush, who has pushed his biological father beyond the periphery of his official circle, is unlikely to do the same to the substitute he acquired when Cheney, entrusted with the task of finding George W. Bush a running mate, found himself. “There is a higher father that I appeal to,” Bush famously told Bob Woodward three years ago. He wasn’t talking about Cheney, but he might as well have been. George W. Bush is far more deferential to Cheney (draft evader, Yale dropout, and tough-guy conservative) than to George H. W. Bush (war hero, Yale Phi Beta Kappa, and kinder, gentler moderate). If, come next year, Cheney really does resign his office “for reasons of health,” he will have done so, almost certainly, for reasons of health.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060313ta_talk_hertzberg
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