WEB EXCLUSIVE | THOMAS OLIPHANT
Cheney's fading credibilityTHE BIG moment, like so many Dick Cheney moments in recent years, turned out to be a flat-out falsehood.
From the audience, I could sense that after a poor, defensive start, the once-steady and reassuring vice president, who threw his credibility into the trash can during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was building to a memorized zinger from his Wyoming practice sessions because he was using uncharacteristically political language and completely dodging the issue presented in the debate's ninth question - about the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict. After John Edwards had demonstrated his command of the issue in his own response, Cheney responded by attacking, of all things, Edwards's attendance record in the Senate, reciting his handlers' catchy name for him, Senator Gone, and then, after a dramatic pause, concluding: ''The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.'' Off camera, Cheney grinned smugly in self-congratulation. Today, however, he is explaining all the occasions in and out of the Senate when the two were in fact together - many of them recited with great glee to a cheering crowd by Elizabeth Edwards at a post-debate rally. The great, planned moment for Cheney turned out to be on a par with weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's nonrole in the 9/11 attacks, Iraq's nonties to Al Qaeda, and the millions of Iraqis waiting to welcome the invading Americans. Cheney's falsehood was in total contrast to the counter-attack Edwards used after the vice president's defining moment had passed. If you want to talk records, he obliged by listing some of Cheney's most bizarre decisions as a member of the House of Representatives: one of 10 members (out of 435) to vote against Head Start, one of four to oppose banning plastic weapons designed to fool metal detectors, against money for the Meals on Wheels program for senior citizens, against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and against a resolution calling for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. The reason behind Cheney's dramatic misstatement of an easily verifiable fact is revealing. It helps explain why Cheney's performance overall may have been helpful to George Bush in its appeal to already rabid Republicans, but why Edwards's was more helpful to John Kerry in its stronger appeal to the undecided or still-persuadable. In the preceding exchange Edwards had the temerity to raise the issue that drives Cheney nuts - Halliburton, the continuously in-trouble conglomerate Cheney used to run and still gets lucrative deferred compensation from. Unlike Cheney, Edwards is not spending today explaining any falsehoods. Despite the desires by some Democrats for a Halliburton festival in the debate, Edwards brought it up only twice, each time as a counter-attack. And each time he displayed the attention to detail that used to characterize Cheney until he took office. Continued... |
