Obama v Cheney

David Brooks makes, to me, the only interesting point so far about the back and forth between Obama and Cheney. He points out that Cheney's real influence in the Bush White House started to wane beginning in 2005. Many of the changes that have been pinned on Obama actually started in Bush's second term. So who was Cheney really attacking?

When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.

Brooks argues that substantively little has changed in terrorism policy between Bush's second term and Obamas current term. What has changed is the manner in which the policies are communicated:

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”

Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world. In his speech, Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect.

He suggests for further info that we read The Cheney Fallacy, an article written by Jack Goldsmith, an ex-Bush Administration official known for having run ins with Cheney. I wonder if a rift between the Bush and Cheney camps will break open at some point.

Candidate Cheney

Ross Douthat argues strongly in favor of the marketplace ideas, and of elections as the appropriate vehicle for the discussion of ideas. Had Cheney decided to run for president, and received the nomination of his party, we would have had the debate on torture that we are missing today:

. . . the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.

Here Dick Cheney, prodded by the ironies of history into demanding greater disclosure about programs he once sought to keep completely secret, has an important role to play. He wants to defend his record; let him defend it. And let the country judge.

But better if this debate had happened during the campaign season. And better, perhaps, if Cheney himself had been there to have it out.

Another role for elections in a democracy

Stay Behinds?

Seymour Hersch thinks ex-VP Cheney left "stay behinds" in the bureaucracy in order to serve as his eyes and ears on the Obama Administration. From what I've read, Cheney seems to be as adroit a player in bureaucratic maneuvering as has ever existed.

On the Libby Pardon -- Or Lack of it

Maybe the most surprising outcome of the Bush presidency was the lack of pardons toward the end of his term. Conspiracy theorists and critics were ready for inevitable pardons of various Bush officials, including Cheney and Rumsfeld for any real or potential legal problems that might ensue in the coming years.

Not that there weren't advocates for pardons. The NYT reports that Cheney tried repeatedly to get Bush to pardon Scooter Libby to no avail.

Can There Be Another VP Like Cheney?

We discussed this in one of today's classes. Has Cheney fundamentally transformed the office of the vice president, or was his effectiveness in the office a function of his unique skill set?

I think its the later, and so does the Barton Gelman:

Dick Cheney made his mark by transforming the job of vice president into something very close to deputy president. Now the question is whether Sarah Palin, and to a lesser extent Joe Biden, can carry on his legacy—or whether America should want them to. The answer to both questions: probably not.

Cheney brought to office a singular blend of knowledge, experience, discipline, zealotry, and operational talent. The last two are especially rare in combination, and mercifully so. Zealots drive history harder than opportunists do when they get their hands on the wheel. Cheney won room for maneuver from President Bush, and he knew how to use it.

This is a good read.

On the Vice Presidency

Cheney's impact on what was once a dreary job is the subject of a small handful of new books and currently underlies disputes between Biden and Palin over the constitutional role of the office. Is it open ended or restricted?

Presidential Advising: Cheney and Addington on Bush

Here are a few q and a's in the New Republic which touch on how President Bush and VP Cheney used information in deciding whether and how to torture detainees:

Many have wondered what transformed Vice President Cheney into the Prince of Darkness. Why do you think he embraced Addington's radical legal vision so enthusiastically?

Of course, I don't really know; you can't get inside of his head. I wish I'd been able to interview him. I certainly think he had a pre-existing political agenda, which was to strengthen the executive branch. But people I've interviewed who know him well, including an old family friend who really likes him, said that he was altered in some profound way by 9/11. This particular friend said that he became steely, that he had seen something terrible that he could no longer talk about. And, of course, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell, actually comes out and says that he thinks Cheney became paranoid. Granted, that's a clinical term, and Lawrence Wilkerson is not a doctor. But there's more than ample evidence that he became obsessed with the terrorist threat, and you could question whether his judgment became skewed.

I think one of the interesting questions is whether after 9/11 the top people in the Bush administration didn't almost poison themselves with information. They removed all the filters on the kind of intelligence information that went to the president and vice president and other top people in the administration. Prior to 9/11, the CIA and the FBI screened out all the unreliable information about what kinds of threats were coming in. But after 9/11, Cheney in particular wanted to see everything. He no longer trusted that the CIA was able to screen it properly. So, according to one of the people I quote, Roger Cressey, who was at the National Security Council at the time, they started just bombarding themselves every morning with these reports filled with what Cressey describes as mostly garbage, but that were completely alarming. And so, in the words of Jim Comey again, he describes it as locking yourself in a room with Led Zeppelin every morning. You would just lose your mind.

Why did Bush turn over so much of his presidency to Cheney and Addington? Did he understand the radicalism of the positions taken in his name?

This is such a good question. I've interviewed people who are more moderate than Cheney in the administration, who like to think that if they had only been able to get more information to President Bush, he would have put the brakes on. And they blame Cheney and Addington and a small group of others around them for too radically narrowing the information that reached President Bush. Yet there were memos that did reach the president. He certainly had the basic outlines of what was going on. What I'm told is that Cheney really knew how to play him, and would say in meetings, If we don't continue to use the most extreme possible methods on terror suspects, if anything goes wrong, you'll be blamed. And nobody ever did a Plan B kind of analysis to see whether this radical course in fact was necessary for national security. The CIA never sent in a team to see whether they got better information out of torturing people or out of not torturing people. There was no alternative program that was ever given to the president about how to treat terrorist suspects.

What about Jack Goldsmith's thesis that Bush's excesses resulted from a failure to recognize that presidential power is the power to persuade. Was Bush's problem that he had contempt for politics?

No, I think that, again, what Cheney convinced Bush of was that if they did not go to the farthest possible regions of the law, the most outermost edges of what you could do to detainees, then they would be shirking their responsibility in terms of protecting the country. So rather than having a policy debate and a political debate on what the right thing to do was, and what the smartest thing to do was, they simply let the lawyers define policy by setting the outer limits of the law. You have John Yoo saying, "Well, I'm just a lawyer; I'm just telling you what you can do legally. It's above my pay grade to have a policy debate." But his judgments became the policy because they didn't have that debate.

The Energy Task Force

For over six years the White House, the vice president specifically, has claimed that executive privilege allowed him to not reveal who participated in meetings of the White House Energy Task Force. The courts have agreed, but the Washington Post has been able to find out who was there anyway.

Not a controversial list (Ken Lay aside) which leads one to wonder why the fuss? The principle of secrecy in all likelihood.

Counter Offensive

The Weekly Standard and William Kristol try to stop the bleeding by publcishing a couple of feel good pieces about Cheney and Bush. Will they be enough?

More on Cheney

Andrew Sullivan argues for impeachment.

"Most Americans are not yet fully aware that this vice-president believes that the executive branch is not subject to domestic or international law, has inherent powers to arrest, detain indefinitely without charges and torture anyone on earth if it so wishes, and can wire-tap Americans without any court oversight for good measure. These are not emergency powers in wartime, but permanent new powers since we are in permanent new state of war. Alongside our constitution, Cheney has constructed a rival governing force, a protectorate, answerable to no one and no law, dedicated to our security. We do get to select that protector every four years (our "accountability moment"), but that's the extent of our ultimate constitutional and legal protection. This is not self-government; it's delegation of power to a single leader-guardian-decider. The president is not really the president in this constitutional model. Presidents preside over a constitutional order. Protectors act as constant and energetic guardians of the security of others. They are outside the law, because they believe the law impedes the necessity for risk-free security."

He quotes one of his readers who suggests that impeachments were intended to be more frequent, the proof being it's "asymmetrical" structure. A simple majority for impeachment and a 2/3rds majority for removal from office. I don't know if I buy the argument, but its worth chewing over.

According to a recent poll, 54% of respondents support impeachment (76% of Democrats, 51% of Independents, and 17% of Republicans)

Here's the rub though. Do Democrats really want him out of office? He may be a great foil for them to run against. Notice that no one seems to care about Donald Rumsfeld anymore. It might be best to keep him in the limelight--maybe Republicans should want to kick him put. Plus if Democrats impeach him it opens the door to retaliation when a Republican Congress has the chance--not that they would actually do anything like that.

Congressman Cheney

As suggested below, Cheney's efforts to expand executive power predate his current position as vice-president. This article points out how his minority report on the Iran-Contra scandal (which he didn't consider a scandal at all) introduces arguments that have been expanded more recently.

It also suggests that he thought Congress overstepped in its investigations of Richard Nixon. His career follows an interesting path. He works in Nixon and Ford's White House, where he seeks to expand presidential powers, and then spends time in Congress where he attempts to do the same, but this time by undermining Congress from within. Now as vice-president he further expands those powers.

What focus. One wonders what motivates him.

H Res 333

On April 24 Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney and recent events have led a small number of additional members of Congress to sign on.

That makes seven, which ain't much, but who knows if additional revelations might lead others to join up? It's worth monitoring.

Seriously?

Slate makes a case for Cheney's impeachment.

Now About Cheney...

Time to outline the fallout from the vice president's latest attempt to justify keeping his activities and records secret.

In order to circumvent a rule that the National Archives be allowed access to classified documents to ensure that they are properly handled, he famously asserted that since his office has legislative functions, it is not part of the executive branch and is not subject to those rules. This has been going on for several years. Officers from the National Archives apparently went to the vice president's office to pick up the records and were prevented from entering. Mr. Cheney has since attempted to have the National Archives disbanded in order to get them off his back.

My first impression, and I can so easily be underestimating him, is that this is a gross miscalculation. This claim is so patently silly that it will rally opposition to him. He just looks ridiculous and has negated the fear and leverage he had used to silence potential opponents. I wonder if he still had the services of Scooter Libby if this would have happened. Fallout like this is what quality aides are there to prevent.

The floodgates are now open though and critics are becoming more vocal. Analyses of the role of the vice president over the course of this administration are also more frequent. The most interesting is a series of articles now being published by the Washington Post. The authors suggest that Cheney has been at the heart of the most important of the president's policies over his term of office. Cheney is described as detail oriented and technical, Bush less so. Presentations to Cheney are more precise than those given to the president. He is also secretive in order to hide his influence--which helps make him stronger. He's the unseen force making things happen. This is why he guard his privacy and does what he can to keep his actions secret.

Cheney is said to see his office as the de facto chief of staff for the president meaning that he is the gatekeeper that says what goes forward and what does not: "The president is "the decider," as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices."

It is difficult to read the article and not come to the conclusion that Cheney runs the show. This might be unfair, and maybe untrue at the end of the day, but that's how it seems