Amid differences, a point of accord for Obama, Cheney

But whether that craziness stemmed from clear thinking - a sudden awareness of the nation's vulnerability and the need for aggressive action - or whether it was the product of fear that led to bad decisions that hurt America's image is a great subject for debate.

That debate never really happened in the 2008 presidential election because GOP nominee John McCain agreed with Obama on many terrorism policies, but it picked up with a vengeance yesterday, with Cheney's insistence that renouncing waterboarding weakens the nation, while Obama declared that the Bush administration "made decisions based on fear rather than foresight."

The past was the grist for both speeches, but the battleground was clearly the future. Cheney laid down a marker that he and his party will redeem at the first sign of a breach in national security, while Obama placed himself firmly on the high road.

In taking on a president near the height of his popularity, Cheney was on a risky mission, to say the least. But the former vice president, already unpopular, had nothing to lose and much to gain. As he did often over the last eight years, he presented himself as the bearer of harsh, unpleasant truths, the messenger that you might want to strike down but can't completely dismiss.

"If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field," Cheney said, in an obvious swipe at Obama. "And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations and whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder if they had misjudged us all along. Instead, the terrorists see just what they were hoping for: our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."

In fact, as one of former President Bush's legal advisers, Jack Goldsmith, has pointed out, Obama hasn't really abandoned Bush's framework for the war on terrorism, but he's sharply altered its message.

Like Bush, Obama insists that American values ultimately will win over the world. Unlike Bush, Obama believes that "dead or alive" rhetoric and extreme measures such as waterboarding undermine those values.

Cheney, of course, believes that harsh actions convey strength, while acknowledging limits expresses weakness.

Neither Obama's speech nor Cheney's was particularly flush with strategic insights: They were too forceful for anything like that. And both men, speaking before friendly audiences, pushed a little too hard. Obama invoked his status as commander-in-chief to guarantee that no lives were endangered by giving up waterboarding, as if his status alone could make it so.

Likewise, Cheney repeatedly declared that waterboarding is legal - and constitutional, and carefully vetted - as if simply asserting it could make it so. (Cheney apparently is relying on the idea that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to enemy combatants.)

In the short-term, Obama is likely to get the better of this face-off. Cheney invoked too many familiar tropes of the Bush years - attacking the press, insisting that criticism of policies is a show of disrespect for "brave" troops or interrogators - to do more than arouse the Republican base.

The public accepted the Bush-Cheney viewpoint until evidence from Iraq suggested that the administration, in its determination to stay on the offense, had lost touch with common sense. But Americans are good at forgetting failures, and the hard-line position on national security, like Dick Cheney himself, is never completely out of the picture.

Five years after the United States extricated itself from Vietnam, a decades-long entanglement that caused endless pain and anguish, Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a campaign that Vietnam was "a noble cause" and that the nation had gone weak.

Cheney won't be the next Republican presidential nominee to make that claim. But he's laying the groundwork for whoever picks up the mantle.