The Big Giant Head
The Man and his OZ
Who wears the pants
Puppet Master
A lobbyist's Lobbyist
Vested Interest
Buddy, can you take their dime
He'll talk, I'll disappear
The Morphing of the Presidency
Prism Politics.. The Real Angle
December 9, 2003
POLITICS AND POLICY
Out of Sight, Cheney Is Power
Vice President Wields
Extensive Influence,
But Avoids Public Eye
By GREG HITT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Late one Friday afternoon about a year ago, Vice President Dick Cheney put a call through to an unsuspecting lawyer at the Department of the Interior. On his mind: water rights in Oregon's Klamath River.
A prominent Oregon Republican had lobbied the vice president to allow more water to be diverted from the river for farmers, and Mr. Cheney was irked that the Interior Department wasn't moving fast enough. Instead of delegating the matter, as might be expected amidst the larger worries of terrorism and Iraq, Mr. Cheney took matters into his own hands. "What are you doing?" he said in a terse voicemail message left for the attorney, recalls a person familiar with the call. "Why are we doing this?"
The water eventually got released. But Mr. Cheney's role in the seemingly small-time drama never came to light, underscoring the way he prefers to do business: far behind the scenes.
That Mr. Cheney would plunge into the issue at all underlines how he has turned the very job of vice president upside down. Normally vice presidents have limited duties and make maximum efforts to publicize them. Mr. Cheney does the opposite. Never in modern times has there been a vice president who has taken on such extensive responsibilities, and never has there been a vice president who so assiduously sought to escape the public eye.
Mr. Cheney's clout on national security, and his central role in the war on terrorism and Iraq, are well known. Far less understood is that he plays a similarly vital role on economic and domestic decisions. A look inside the administration's agenda of the last year shows Mr. Cheney was a central player in maneuvering on tax cuts, the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit and the national energy bill that is still pending. And, contrary to stereotypes that have developed about the vice president, an inside look at that role shows that his influence often pushes the process toward pragmatic compromise, not ideologically charged conservative stands.
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The fact that his role has been little discussed isn't an accident. In September, for instance, when the White House was trying to give some momentum to the big bill to provide prescription drugs for Medicare, Mr. Cheney joined the president in the Roosevelt Room as he goaded members of the House and Senate to come together. But when it came time to let the cameras in for a ritual photo-op, Mr. Cheney slipped out before reporters could catch a shot of him.
Mr. Cheney meets nearly every Wednesday with the White House economic team in the dark, wood-paneled Ward Room in the White House mess, using one lunch with the group to launch a discussion of "dynamic scoring," the budget-estimating approach that assumes tax cuts produce new revenue by generating more economic activity. He helped sell the president on the idea of a dividend-tax cut in this year's big tax bill. On Medicare, he has helped split differences by promising rural senators that the White House would support higher funding for their regional hospitals as part of a legislation creating a new drug benefit. "He has a huge sandbox," says Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff.
Conversely, Mr. Cheney, an avid fisherman who ties his own flies, has managed to avoid much of the fluff and make-work that historically defines the vice presidency. He doesn't do second-tier foreign travel as a stand-in for the president. Mr. Cheney has been overseas just once, for a pre-Iraq-war tour of the Middle East.
Mr. Cheney's most obvious impact has been in national security, where he was an architect of the policy of military pre-emption against terrorism, and he has made perhaps the strongest and most consistent case that Saddam Hussein needed to be ousted.
Mr. Cheney was instrumental in creating the homeland-security office within the White House, then helped mold legislation that later turned the office into a cabinet agency.
Early in the administration, Mr. Cheney blocked a power grab by economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey that would have eroded the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Lindsey wanted to head up the effort to establish a new policy on whether utilities must add expensive environmental equipment to their plants. Mr. Lindsey says he was looking to establish a proper interagency review. But Mr. Cheney told him, "You'll have a seat at the table but we're not moving that issue out," according to a person familiar with the situation. Ultimately, the administration made a decision that pleased utilities.
Mr. Cheney hasn't allowed himself to be pigeon-holed. In fact, unlike in the Clinton White House -- or the first Bush and Reagan administrations, for that matter -- this vice president's staff is integrated into the policy apparatus in a way that veteran White House watchers of both parties say is unique in recent memory.
Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also holds the title of assistant to the president, a practice begun in the Clinton-Gore era. But the cooperation extends far down the chain of command. Candi Wolff, for example, is not only Mr. Cheney's top liaison with Congress, but she is taking the White House lead as the Bush energy bill wends through Capitol Hill.
There's a limit, of course, to how far Mr. Cheney can go. In an audience granted last summer to business lobbyists, he signaled his sympathy with a proposal to lower the tax on corporate earnings that are kept abroad. The issue hasn't gone anywhere, however. Mr. Bush opposes it.
Whatever counsel Mr. Cheney provides at the outset of domestic initiatives, his ultimate role often is as a shepherd of Bush initiatives.
As this year's big tax measure moved through Congress, Mr. Cheney played the role of shepherd. One day in midspring, Kevin Hassett, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, got a surprise call from the vice president's office -- when the Iraq war was still hot, he recalls -- asking for an analysis of an arcane aspect of the debate on the growth package. He pulled together a memo and e-mailed it over, "shocked" at the level of detail that was requested, he recalls.
Those close to the vice president say the request was routine.
--Bob Davis contributed to this article.
Write to Greg Hitt at greg.hitt@wsj.com1 |
