Dump Cheney? That’s the buzz along Washington, D.C.’s Beltway. But the United States Vice President Dick Cheney denies incumbent Bush will dump him, either now or at the upcoming Republican National Convention.
He claims Bush has made it “very clear he doesn’t want to break up the team.” And Cheney’s wife, Lynne, affirmed to C-SPANN, “Oh, it’ll happen,” when questioned about whether her husband would be on the Republican ticket. “It’ll happen.”
“It’ll happen.” Dick and Lynne have spoken. But what of the rest of the Republican Party?
Cheney’s stronghold is among the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors, some of whom Bush is seen trading Al-Qaeda jokes with in Michael Moore’s controversial documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
“You are my base,” chuckles President Bush, as white-tied Republican big-money donors howl with laughter and applaud fervently to this obvious allusion to Osama Bin Laden’s outfit, which in English means, “the base.”
This is the kind of punchline where they say, “I guess you had to be there” to understand how funny it is. The White Tie Republicans find it easy to write huge checks for the Bush/Cheney ticket.
Problem is, they can only vote once. Each. And that may not be enough to keep “the team” in office.
A recent Newsweek poll indicates that the Kerry/Edwards ticket would beat Bush/Cheney by 51% to 45%, with a 4% margin or error. But the same poll shows that a Bush/Powell ticket would win over Kerry/Edwards by 53% to 44%, while a Bush/McCain ticket would win by 49% to 47%.
Gosh, choosing winning candidates with whom voters strongly identify would give Bush and the Republicans not just a win, but the significant moral boost the Republican party will need in upcoming political races, but that would mean “breaking up the team.”
More than a few Republicans would like to see Cheney go. Persistent issues of his precarious health aside, Cheney’s approval ratings have plummeted.
He hawkishly promoted the increasingly unpopular Iraq War, he is firmly entrenched in the Neocon camp (which is at least in part responsible for the allegedly poor intelligence Bush received regarding Al-Qaeda in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction), and contentions that he may have helped friends personally profit from promoting Halliburton’s Iraq involvement have come under increasing public scrutiny.
Moreover, Cheney’s extraordinary act of isolating Bush at a moment of great national crisis, and then issuing “shoot down” orders to scrambling jets without consulting his commander-in-chief has given even radical Republicans cause to pause.
Are Dick and Lynne the only Republicans who matter? Is the Republican Party truly controlled by Bush’s White Tie “Base?”
Ordinary Republicans should start asking these questions of their party’s leaders, and fast.
Because this upcoming presidential election is about much more than the war on terror.
It is about winning back the hearts and minds of Americans to the Republican Party.
And it is about preserving whatever is left of America’s fast-dissipating reservoir of moral good will in the world. This good will is real, and once lost, is slow to be replaced.
And these two things, American hearts and minds, and international good will, are inextricably intertwined. But getting both back means “breaking up the team.” There is no other way.
If the White Tie Base wants the Republican Party to survive, it must “break up the team.” And “the team” is more than just Cheney. It is the Neocons, of whom Cheney is the most hawkish, primary member.
Even Americans who don’t know who the Neocons are, or what they stand for, are looking increasingly askance at Bush’s “pre-emption doctrine,” which has plunged the United States into a war of increasingly global proportions that fewer and fewer voters believe is about fighting terrorism or hunting down Al-Qaeda — the ideas that made Bush, a president who came to office largely by fortuitous judicial circumstance, genuinely popular in the first place.
Instead, the Bush/Cheney “pre-emption doctrine,” fostered by the Neocons, has not only alienated Europe and other traditional US allies, but carries the risk of placing the US at war not only with most of the Middle East, but also with a good part of Asia and Central Asia.
And American influence, popularity, and trade potentialities in these regions’ nations, all of which have significant and growing Muslim populations, is declining.
In the war of ideas, which is what a “war on terror” largely is, this is not good news. Bush’s loyalty to subordinates is legendary.
He stuck by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whom he could have easily and rightfully jettisoned over the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Rumsfeld dodged that bullet, in large part because America’s horror was diverted by Al-Zarqawi’s beheading of a few hostages. Most Americans concurred with Bush that beheading is a “barbaric” practice, although neither Bush nor the American public have yet so characterized murder by flashlight beatings, or suffocation by sitting on a squirming prisoner’s mouth and nose, both of which allegedly took place at US-run Iraqi prisons.
And yet Bush’s loyalty cannot be allowed to destroy the Republican Party. What is at stake is much more than Bush’s ability to squeak by yet again in another hotly contested election that irretrievably divides America again.
What is at stake is the future of Republicanism, and its ability to unite the nation behind powerful ideals, as Nixon and Reagan did. This is the precious legacy that Bush, sticking by Cheney and the Necon team, risks squandering.
And it cannot be denied that, far from “winning” the “war on terror,” under Cheney and the Neocon “team,” the US is actually losing the war on terrorism. More terrorists are now in Iraq than ever before.
Warlordism and narcotrafficking have resurged and are on the rise in Afghanistan, all despite US military and civilian oversight orchestrated by dedicated Neocons.
And the Bush/ Cheney doctrine of “carrying the war to the terrorists” may eventually land US troops, already thinned and stretched to the breaking point, in new insurgent struggles already under way in places like Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Algeria...and more.
But again, under the Bush/Cheney Neocon team’s logic, why bother going to where the real terrorists actually are? Why not just invade another Muslims state in the Middle East?
Frankly, as much as Halliburton and corporate others might find the prospect or toppling yet another state in the name of democracy appealing, Americans will not stand for it. “Fool me once, shame on you,” goes the popular adage Bush could not articulate in Moore’s scathing documentary. “Fool me twice, shame on me.”
American voters are slow to defy their leadership in times of crisis. But they are far from stupid. Vietnam proved this, and proved it most convincingly through a presidential election. And Korea proved it before that.
Eisenhower, a war hero with virtually no political experience whatsoever, won his presidency by pledging to resolve the Korean debacle. Just because it happened a while ago, don’t think the Democrats haven’t forgotten their stinging loss on that one.
The Bush/Cheney Neocon “team” might win the presidency. But the real question is whether it can survive the fallout sure to come.
Dump Cheney? The only real question is, when? In time for the Republicans to win, and to save what the party stands for.
(Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.)
