Vice-Grip

Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com points out that Dick Cheney's reputation as Superman might be a bit, er, overblown. Consider the record:

• Cheny was sent not long ago to fire Treasury Sec Paul O'Neill. This might have been fitting because it was Cheney who had picked O'Neill two years earlier.

• Of the three new members of the president's economic team nominated in early December, Snow was the only one to get almost universally poor reviews. He was also Dick Cheney's pick.

• In a July speech, the vice president had argued that weapons inspections in Iraq were useless and shouldn't even be tried. That speech nearly upended the administration's careful late-summer repositioning in favor of a new United Nations-backed inspections program.
  Condi Rice had to take the vice president aside and walk him through how to repair the damage he'd done, with a new statement implicitly retracting his earlier gaffe.

• Last year, Cheney's White House energy task force produced an all-drilling-and-no-conservation plan that failed not just on policy grounds but as a political matter as well, saddling the administration with a year-long public relations headache after Cheney insisted on running his outfit with a near-Nixonian level of secrecy.

• Last March, VPOTUS went on a tour of Middle Eastern capitals to line up America's allies for our war against Saddam. He returned a week later with the Arabs lining up behind Saddam and against us--a major embarrassment for the White House.

• And remember those corporate scandals that came close to crippling Bush? Last summer, White House advisers were pondering whether to back the sort of tough corporate accountability measures that Democrats and the press were demanding.

  The president was scheduled to deliver a big speech on Wall Street in early July. His advisers were divided. Some argued that strong reforms were at the least a political necessity.

  But Cheney, along with National Economic Council chair Larry Lindsey, opposed the idea, arguing that new restrictions on corporations would further weaken the economy. The president took Cheney's advice, and gave a speech on Wall Street that recommended only mild and unspecific reforms.

  "He mentioned a lot of things in the speech that the Securities and Exchange Commission already does," one non-plussed Wall Streeter told The Washington Post with a yawn. The day after the president's speech, the Dow shed 282 points, the biggest single-day drop since the post-terrorist tailspin of Sept. 20.

• The policy of confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, which the administration is now running away from and which has gotten the US into such a jam, was most forcefully backed by Cheney.

• There is also a growing consensus that the president's new stimulus/tax cut plan is a loser both politically and in policy terms. Not surprisingly, the prime mover, as Major Garrett reports in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, was none other than Dick Cheney.

Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration--the CEO to Bush's chairman--is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.