Dick Cheney not fading away like other vice presidents

WASHINGTON -- Dick Cheney refuses to be a has-been.

The former vice president's voice appears to carry even more weight than it did in the waning days of the Bush administration.

Some people want him to be quiet and disappear. Others are cheering the public relations tour that Cheney began halfway through President Obama's first 100 days, defending the Bush administration's interrogation tactics and other anti-terrorism policies.

Vice presidents typically fade away quietly.

Not Cheney.

When Obama released memos detailing Bush-era interrogation techniques and wouldn't completely rule out prosecuting or disciplining former Bush administration officials, Cheney couldn't stay silent.

"It wasn't like on Jan. 21, he planned that he was going to speak out in this way," said Cheney's daughter, Liz, a former State Department official who has traveled extensively with her father. "It was driven by events, and I think he will continue to do it if he feels it's important to the public debate."

"You just have to know the way he works," she said. "He was watching what was going on. He knew it was wrong and he knew he had an obligation to say it was wrong."

Cuts both ways

Cheney's decision to make his case on talk shows and deliver speeches at think tanks cuts both ways. His message fires up conservatives but also rallies Democratic opponents who don't miss an opportunity to portray Cheney as the lead spokesman of the Republican Party.

"I would think the Republicans ought to be shy in using him as their front," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Even some prominent Republicans aren't too happy about Cheney's message.

Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the nation's first homeland security chief, was asked if he agreed with Cheney's assertion that the Obama administration has made the country less safe. "I do not," Ridge said.

Cheney supporters say the former vice president has received an outpouring of supportive e-mails, calls and comments from the military community, the families of those who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and from people at the CIA, which helped carry out the interrogation program.

'It's nothing personal'

His backers claim Cheney is having an impact. They point to Obama's move to reverse himself and fight the court-ordered release of prisoner abuse photos and his decision to revive military tribunals for some suspected terrorists, although he is revamping how that system would work.

They also cite the Democratic-controlled Senate's vote to deny Obama $80 million to close the prison camp in eight months, as the president promised.

"It's nothing personal. It's nothing political. It's not legacy," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin, who has known Cheney for three decades. "There's one and only one thing that's animating and motivating his advocacy and that's Obama's behavior relative to these security policies -- the release of the legal memos and the open-endedness of the potential prosecution of the intelligence gatherers or the lawyers."

Matalin said Cheney wouldn't stop talking even if GOP leaders asked him to.

Cheney, 68, has always been straightforward. But when he walked in Bush's shadow he had to temper his public remarks, stay on the White House message.

Out of office, he has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews.

"I don't know if this is some sort of psychological liberation," said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University who has written extensively on the vice presidency. "Now he can come out of the undisclosed locations. He's his own man again. He's free from those restraints that are inherent in being vice president -- even if you are the most powerful vice president in history."

It's deja vu for Cheney, who once was on the other end of a former vice president unplugged.

In September 2004, Al Gore, the cautious campaigner, transformed into a Bush basher, faulting Cheney for "sleazy and despicable" criticism of the Democrats. A Bush White House spokesman dismissively responded: "Consider the source."

The tables have turned. At the White House on Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said it appears that Cheney's latest speech was an extension of the same argument that occurred "inside these walls" for many years during the administration in which he served for eight years.