Among Dick Cheney's most effective moments in his debate with John Edwards was when he said he had never met Edwards, even though he was on Capitol Hill nearly every Tuesday when the Senate is in session. Using his typical boulder-off-the-mountain delivery he said: “The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”
This, of course, is now widely known to be false. They have met at least twice before. Once when Cheney in his capacity as president of the Senate issued the oath of office to Elizabeth Dole, Edwards' North Carolina colleague in the Senate, and another time at a prayer breakfast. Tim Russert reports a third meeting when they both appeared on his show Meet The Press on the same Sunday morning.
More interesting, however, was Edwards' decision not to correct the error or respond to the larger criticism embedded in the quip: namely, that Edwards and John Kerry have not been in Washington doing their jobs as United States senators.
No doubt it seems that, in the midst of a political campaign, it would be to your advantage if you could prove that your opponent was essentially guilty of dereliction of duty while on the public payroll. The refrain from Cheney, that Senators Edwards and Kerry have been AWOL from the Senate, seems an easy and obvious line of attack, but it is likely to have little effect. No one can run for president while perfectly executing another job (except perhaps that of the president), and Americans understand that.
While they are indeed missing lot of votes, it is hard to make the argument that any of them are that important at this juncture, especially compared to running for president. And what on its face seems like a negative may actually turn out to help their campaign. The reason they are missing votes is because they are not in Washington, and that can only help any member of Congress running for president. We know the track record: The last person elected to the presidency directly from the Senate was John F. Kennedy; before him it was Warren Harding in 1920. The last president elected directly from the House was James Garfield in 1880. The soil and climate on the Hill is not conducive to the production of strong presidential timber. That's why we end up with governors, generals, and the occasional ascendant vice president. And it is a simple result of how Washington teaches you to communicate. Senators stand at the desk in the Senate and talk to an empty chamber, literally not talking to anyone. While governors and mayors learn how to talk to people, the Hill crowd learns how to talk about programs. They get things on the record, rather than getting them done.
Part of the reason Howard Dean attracted so much early attention, apart from the fact that he was talking about the thing Democrats wanted to talk about, was that he used language that allowed people to know what he cared about.
Alternately, a lot of early resistance to Kerry was that he often sounded like he was alone on a mountaintop talking to a transcription machine. Indeed, the whole Bush campaign is built on the idea of making Kerry sound like what he is, a senator, and they have had an immeasurable amount of help from the senator himself.
But they may need to re-assess, because the John Kerry who showed up in Miami sounded an awful lot like a man who's forgotten what a senator is supposed to sound like. Short sentences. Hard information. No threat, imminent or distant, of a filibuster. This newly molted Kerry prompted one previously concerned state party chair to observe, “He is in noticeably different space right now.”
As for Edwards, it seems that he wasn't in Washington long enough to have learned the emotionally deadening lingo. “Did figure out you were wrong,” he blurted out to moderator Gwen Ifill, after she mistakenly let him answer a question when it supposed to be Cheney's turn. He didn't dress it up.
Knowing the poor history of congressional candidates running for president, Democrats took a huge chance on Kerry, and then lengthened the odds by essentially demanding that he choose a Senate colleague as his running mate. Sooner or later, someone will tally the votes that Kerry and Edwards have missed together (it will run into the hundreds) and slap them around with the number. But considering the great, dismal swamp that historically has swallowed up the dreams of those trying to get from the Senate to the White House, Kerry and Edwards may be right in stay away from Washington and, for the next few weeks at least, to forget that they had ever been there.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
