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Dick 'n' John
The Veeps Go At It
As soon as John Kerry announced his choice of John Edwards as his running mate, the contrast was unavoidable. This autumn, Edwards, a telegenic, bubbly trial lawyer who looks 40 at most will go up against Big Daddy Cheney, the bald, dour, snarling vice-president whose most recent public pronouncement was to tell a leading Democratic senator to "go f*** yourself" on the Senate floor. Edwards is a Southerner from a modest background, but he is also a member of the new class - a trial lawyer multi-millionaire with a fiercely independent wife with a career of her own. Cheney is from Wyoming, one of the sparsest and most beautiful of American heartland states, a man who laid railroad tracks in his youth and quickly made a name in politics as defender of conservative values and defense hawkishness. He married his high school sweetheart.
And last week, the cultural contrasts were even more pronounced. The scenes of the two Democratic candidates in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania were picture perfect. Small children added to the JFK tableau. The rhetoric was warm and populist and broad-grinned. The two men were very touchy-feely, clasping each other, always close, almost the definition of the "new men" of the boomer era. You simply couldn't imagine Bush and Cheney having anything like such a physical rapport. When asked what he thought of the John Edwards pick last week, president Bush replied tartly: "Dick Cheney can be president." That kind of gruff, serious, non-nonsense language couldn't be more distant from the blathery uplift heard from Kerry in his announcement speech. My favorite line? Kerry's peroration: "We've come here today to put a team together that's going to fight to bring back America's mighty dream. We're going out of here today to let America be America again. Let's go out and make it happen together." A prize for anyone who has a clue what that piece of verbal flatulence actually means.
But beneath the cultural surface, there is also a simple truth about these two vice-presidential candidates. They both represent the bases of their respective parties. In a polity that is as polarized as it ever has been, where congressional districts have been gerry-mandered so radically that over 90 percent of representatives are in safe seats, both the Republicans and Democrats have become far more insular parties. The people who make it to the top are no longer those who can forge compromises, but those who can rally the faithful.
This is what Edwards really represents. He is an extremely liberal Senator, even though he is from the South. Congressional score-cards put his voting record as the fourth most left-wing Senator in the latest session (Kerry is the most left-wing of any in the Democratic caucus). The Republicans swiftly put out an attack sheet on Edwards' legislative past, and, for all its partisan edge, it makes for interesting reading. Edwards voted to keep the abortion of late-term babies legal - even if it involves the grotesque procedure of crushing a newborn's skull while still in the womb. He's an avowed protectionist, opposing NAFTA and almost every other trade accord. He has voted against every tax cut Bush has proposed. But he voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act, that grants authorities greater police power to curtail civil liberties in the war on terror; and he voted in favor of war against Saddam (although, like Kerry, he subsequently voted against the $87 billion required to finance the liberation).
Just as important, Edwards also represents a critical Democratic fundraising constituency - trial lawyers. These lawyers sue corporations or governments mainly for personal injuries that affect individuals. If you are as smart and as rhetorically gifted as Edwards, you can win millions in damages - and take a huge proportion in fees. This, of course, ratchets up the price of malpractice insurance for a whole swathe of industries, especially healthcare, and has contributed dramatically to higher prices for a whole range of goods and services. Business groups want to change this system, and Republicans generally favor tort reform. So the trial lawyers have become a very influential group financing the Democratic party's campaigns. A huge proportion of Edwards' own campaign money comes from the trial lawyers. And they have helped make the Kerry campaign the best financed challenge in American history. Edwards is a sop to this constituency. He is one of them. He is to the financial base of his party what John Ashcroft is to the fundamentalist base of his.
Now take a look at Dick Cheney's old Congressional record. He was the sole Congressional representative from Wyoming for several years in the 1980s and his voting record was easily one of the most arch-conservative in the Congress. He voted against sanctions on South Africa and against AIDS research. He voted against every single measure to control gun sales. He even voted against bans on armor-piercing bullets and on guns with plastic components that can foil airport metal detectors. He also opposed a bill to let government employees donate their holidays or sick leave to other workers with an illness or family emergency. There wasn't a defense program he didn't like or a tax cut he didn't vote for. True, he is not a born again Christian - but Bush nails down that part of the coalition. Instead, Cheney is the old-style tough-as-nails conservative.
So in Cheney and Edwards, you have in some ways a microcosm of how divided and polarized America now is. To be sure, they do have some rounded edges. Cheney was always a federalist and has a libertarian, Western streak in him. In the 2000 campaign, he opposed the idea of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, arguing that the states should retain the ability to decide for themselves. His own daughter, Mary, is openly lesbian, and a critical member of his campaign staff. But when the religious right made a Consitutional Amendment a litmus test for Republicans, Cheney caved. He refused to say if he had changed his mind on the subject but acquiesced simply to what the president demanded. The vote will take place next week.
Equally, with Edwards, there are few signs that he shares the gut hostility to American power now endemic on the left. His populist pitch - about reuniting the "two Americas" of the haves and have-nots - is not a bitter tirade. It's a unifying and uplifting message of the Clintonian variety. His vote for war against Saddam completes the astonishing conclusion of the Democrats' primary season: their Iraq policy is now identical to the president's. And in the polls, Edwards does well with independents and Republicans - far better than Kerry does. It's hard not to like him.
With Cheney, alas, the opposite has become the case. Over the last few years, he has almost delighted in keeping out of sight, in cultivating a Dr Evil persona, and lashing out at opponents. During the Abu Ghraib catastrophe, Cheney's instinct was not to apologize or rethink, but to tell reporters, with respect to Rumsfeld, to "get off his case." He recently asailed the New York Times for what he caled "outrageous reporting" on the 9/11 Commission and shows absolutely no regrets about the WMD intelligence before the war. It would be safe to say that Dick Cheney has persuaded almost no one in three years to vote Republican, who wasn't already signed up. And the results are in the polls. In a recent survey, Cheney registered an alarmingly low 22 percent favorability rating, with 31 percent viewing him unfavorably. That unfavorable rating is triple what it was two years ago. Even among Republicans, his approval rating is an anemic 48 percent.
Why not dump him? I've long hoped Bush would replace him with Condi Rice - a cultural and political coup that could transform the race. But Bush won't. He never fires anyone. And, for most of the campaign, the Cheney-Edwards comparison won't matter much anyway. Americans vote for presidents, not vice-presidents. The first polls after the Edwards announcement showed only a very modest bounce for Kerry, suggesting that in this deeply polarized electorate, big shifts are unlikely. But both Edwards and Cheney will be directed to firing up their respective bases, and attacking the opposition. In this, Cheney, oddly enough, may have an advantage. He is good at attacking, while Edwards has built his entire career on a positive message.
The same paradox may well be true about the scheduled debate between them. Edwards is perhaps the best orator from his party for many years. Expect him to raise the roof at the Democrats' convention in Boston. Cheney is terrible on the stump. He doesn't even like applause. At a recent speech when cheers forced him to repeat a sentence, he growled, "You guys want to hear this speech or not?" Edwards, in comparison, targets every member of the audience for charm and persuasion, just as he did so brilliantly with dozens of juries. But in the intimate context of a television debate, Cheney could do well. His low-key, authoritative daddy act will contrast dramatically with Edwards' blow-dried bangs and populist sound-bites. Edwards' best shot? To get a Cheney snarl that reminds voters why they distrust him. Cheney's best shot? To have a foreign policy question where he leaves the neophyte Edwards in the dust. And just because it's a side-show doesn't mean it won't be drama. Think Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader; Austin Powers versus Dr Evil; and the boyish charms of the 1990s versus the cold fear of the new millennium. It will be not so much a vote as a taking of the American temperature. And you couldn't find two more constrasting characters to choose between.
July 10, 2004, Sunday Times.
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