TIME: Cheney's Presence More Scarce at White House

[unhappycamper]

Cheney's Presence More Scarce at White House
By MIKE ALLEN,
TIME

(Nov. 13) -- The signs, apparent to insiders for months, surfaced at a quick clip. Vice President Dick Cheney, once viewed as training wheels for a President who was a novice on the world stage, was becoming less essential.

He disappeared to a new weekend place in Maryland, and friends fretted about his weight. Katrina hit, and he tarried at his home in Wyoming, checking in by videoconference. Harriet Miers was picked for the Supreme Court, and he found out secondhand.

On Capitol Hill last week, the Republican Party was coping with an impasse over spending cuts and the fallout from an embarrassing loss in the Virginia Governor's race, and he was in South Dakota for a week of pheasant hunting. "I just haven't seen him around as much lately," said Sam Brownback, the conservative Republican Senator from Kansas.

Friends say Cheney is well aware that his unique bond with the President, while not broken, is diminished. "He has become," said a former aide still close to the White House, "one adviser among many." Renewing his relationship with a troubled President, the friends say, has become a more urgent mission for the 64-year-old Vice President than bolstering his own sagging public image.

MORE
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051114091809990008


The story also has a poll:

Is Dick Cheney is less important to the president lately?
No, he's just laying low right now....56%
Yes, he's less relevant...............44%

Does Cheney help or hurt the administration?
Hurts....74%
Helps....15%
Neither..11%

What's your impression of Cheney overall?
Mostly negative..76%
Mostly positive..16%
Neutral...........7%
Total Votes: 24,583

[Demeter]

1. The Question Is: Is Bush Avoiding Cheney, or Cheney Avoiding Bush?

Come to think of it, George hasn't been around much either (but is he ever?)

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. Jesus Christ, just say it! Rumsfeld and Cheney took over the presidency

and Bush just figured out he is about to be the World's Greatest Sap. I'll be shocked, SHOCKED, if Cheney gets invited for Christmas dinner.

[Neocondriac]

3. Whitehouse.........

Hell , he can run the country from anywhere. Probably operates out of Bohemian Grove.

[seafan]

4. Cheney is a metastatic liability for the entire Republican survival.

More:

One problem, according to former staff members, is the tightness of the Veep's circle. He relies heavily on his wife Lynne and two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, for advice on media and internal politics. Insiders took his decision to replace Libby with counsel David S. Addington as a sign that Cheney was circling the wagons rather than making peace with his detractors inside the government. They reason that Addington is a hard-liner who has made enemies around the West Wing with his unwillingness to cooperate or yield on troublesome issues like a court fight for access to records of Cheney's energy task force.

--snip

In the end, it's Cheney's steely certainty, a quality the President has so appreciated in the past, that may be most damaging to him now in this season of political reinvention, say people who have worked closely...../ /..Cheney takes pride in not backing down.

In March 2004, when Cheney was about to walk onstage to deliver his first formal excoriation of Senator John Kerry as being soft on Saddam, a frantic aide telephoned to urge him to tone it down. A suicide car bomber had just torn the front off a hotel in central Baghdad. Cable news was going crazy, and aides had nightmares of Cheney speaking in split screen with smoldering rubble.

According to a person familiar with the incident, Cheney raised his right eyebrow, gave a quarter grin and shook off the advice. "The guy cannot be unnerved," the person said. A former Administration official put it this way: "If the VP isn't proven right until after he has kicked off, he's fine with that. The idea of being proved right before the end of his life is a false deadline in his mind. Right is right."