AFTER CHENEY. Don’t miss, over at LGM, Rob‘s thoughts on Dick Cheney‘s power and bureaucratic effectiveness as documented so amply this week in The Washington Post‘s justly-praised series. “He’s a bastard, but within the narrow confines of negotiating and navigating government bureaucracy, he’s a magnificent bastard,” writes Rob. “Perhaps inevitably, it occurs to me to wonder ‘what if he were our bastard?'”
Rob ends up answering his own question with a “no,” and does a good job distilling the basic unavoidable problems a Cheneyesque approach to governance and policy-making entails regardless of the person’s substantive and ideological beliefs. From a slightly different angle — not so much regarding Cheney’s specific bureaucratic approach as regarding his unprecedentedly outsized and ideologically hard-edged role as a partner-in-power of the president — Alex Rossmiller recently argued on our site that liberals should in fact want a Dick Cheney of their own as vice president.
Certainly a question that hasn’t gotten enough attention is what Cheney’s lasting effect on the the vice presidency will turn out to have been in the presidential administrations to come — how transformative and paradigm-shifting his tenure really is, what factors might contribute to or mitigate the office’s continued growth in power, etc.
–Sam Rosenfeld
