May 29, 2009
I remember the exact moment when I knew who I was voting for in the 2000 presidential election. I was watching the daily coverage of the campaign on PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour. Dick Cheney stood in front of a barn and next to a bale of hay. He was wearing what he almost always wears. One of those dark gray suits with white shirt and dark tie. He is one of those rare people who look comfortable in a business suit or a hunting jacket or a fishing vest. And, unlike the stylish slouch-wear of my generation, he doesn't seem to care what he looks like. I don't remember what he said, but I do remember how he said it.
Like a grown up.
In a steady and low voice. Eschewing the spirited reason of the BBC dialect of Tony Blair's Anglican priest or the self righteous rise-and-fall-in-tone of Bill Clinton's Baptist preacher. Virtually absent then -- and last week -- from the vice president's voice was the Dr. King-lite of our current President. (Perhaps a better description is Martin-cold -- a school-marmish one-note tone of frightening and tedious consistency with the civil right's leaders sincerity.)
A grown up in the White House is what had been missing in the previous eight years. Clinton's boyish looks and boyish charm masked a boy's appetites and compusion to sate them. Dick Cheney was a man comfortable in himself. Happily married to a woman as intelligent and public-spirited as himself. Unmarked by scandal. A successful businessman and loyal Republican public servant from the low year's following Nixon's resignation. The man in the gray flannel suit goes to Washington.
A year later, as Vice President of the United States, no one should have been surprised that this man whose prime-of-life ambitions were behind him leapt to serve his President and his country; putting the full force of his executive and and public service skills behind restoring national security to a nervous, spooked country.
For this he would be ridiculed almost from the beginning. He took it. Even as he performed his duties providing the experience in national security that President Bush did not have first hand.
So now, he has nothing to lose. He has status and family and a comfortable retirement. His "approval" ratings are already low. And, unlike Obama for example, he didn't throw his gay daughter under the bus during his own re-election campaign. He does not need the grief of boyish media spit balls, nor its ahistorical, arational praise. What he does value is his reputation and his service to the country. For months, President Obama had slandered the Bush Administration without fear of rebuke from the media or the permanent government. He spoke like the smart kid in class who isn't smart enough to understand words have consequences even as they aren't a substitute for actually doing something.
The press labelled Cheney's response to Obama's attacks as a media putsch. A ploy or gambit to embarass the president. The president has shown no discipline in his remarks about his predecessor. His tiresome halting cool voice that has the emotional range of George Clooney or David Letterman (with their same unimaginative self-regard) gives equal weight to a SCOTUS nominee's private (or should-be private) life as it does to grave threats to America's security from unhinged thugocrats.
No one really challenges Cheney's facts. He is accused of attacking the second-term policies of Gates and Secretary Rice, when in fact, the surge, the cyberwar initiative, and the growing concern over North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan/Pakistan, (axis of evil anyone?) all have the marks of the vice-president's paternal anxieties in the face of substantial threats. Not to mention -- well let's do it anyway -- Charles Krauthammer's brilliant comparison of Obama's and Bush/Cheney's anti-terror policies. Which is to say, Obama's resignation -- done with flare and arrogance of course -- to Bush's policies and actions...
Are there any Dick Cheney's in our political future? Bobby Jindal has Cheney's same unremarkable but steady rhetoric of seriousness devoid of homiletic aspirations. Tim Pawlenty also. There are others. I suspect that if we had a recording of the Father of our country's voice, Gen. Washington would sound much the same, with just a touch of Virginia and England.
Typical of the post-war generation, we took it too far. Pryor generations argued with their fathers. We held ours in contempt for being human. For making sacrifices. For not pursuing every prompting of ego and flesh.
Reliability. Constancy. Follow through. Endurance. Bounden duty. Not in the service of a career. But to an idea. To a people.
Bush and Cheney our worst administration?
Wait...
Sam Macomb
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