Cheney’s Lack of Flair Is Just the Ticket for Many in GOP

MESA, Ariz. —  The vice president’s low-pitched voice carries poorly through the hangar. Even with a public address system, the 400 veterans gathered at a vintage aircraft museum outside Phoenix must listen carefully to catch Dick Cheney’s words.

“In our servicemen and -women, the United States,” he begins, then pauses. He mumbles an “excuse me” and starts over: “In our servicemen and -women, the world is seeing the best qualities of the United States, and we are proud of every single one of them.”

The audience sits patiently while he corrects the line. They did not show up expecting a smooth, TV-ready performance.

Cheney reads his remarks with the steady intonation of a priest. His audiences tend to applaud from their seats, not stand up and cheer. He does not have blow-dried good looks or a Colgate smile; on the contrary, he has a pinkish pate and a crooked grin.

And yet, it would be hard to overstate Cheney’s appeal to the Republican rank and file.

In crowds like this -- friendly, pro-military -- his charm arises precisely from his unadorned style, which enhances the sense that he’s leveling with his audience.

Now, as the presidential campaign moves into high gear, the White House is preparing to make new use of this unusual weapon: the anticharisma of Dick Cheney. Largely a behind-the-scenes power player, Cheney is emerging to take on an increasingly public role -- partly as emissary to the party’s conservative base and partly to argue before a wider audience that the Bush administration has the wisdom and experience to navigate an increasingly dangerous world.

In the last week, Cheney undertook a four-day swing through the West, making speeches and raising money in Los Angeles and other cities. Next week he is heading to Europe to mend fences with allies at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and to have an audience with the pope in Rome.

On Thursday, Cheney sat for a formal interview with the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, his first with a national newspaper in nearly two years.

He said his lack of political flair is part of his message.

“I do [campaigning] differently than anybody else, I suppose, than maybe the normal candidate,” Cheney said in a Century City hotel suite, a cup of Starbucks coffee balanced on his knee. “I grew up in Wyoming, and in Wyoming you campaign sort of one vote at a time. They don’t like a lot of flash. Solid, serious conversation is sort of what I’m about, anyway.”

If the reaction in Mesa is any indication, that’s the way his fans like it.

“I don’t want a lot of theatrics,” said Joe Hannam, a Navy veteran and retired salesman from Des Moines, who spends winters in this Republican stronghold. “I want to hear [his message] in a good, concise manner, and that’s what he does.”

“With the vice president, you get what you see and you see what you get,” said Jerry Walker, 58, a retired Navy field medic.

Cheney’s role in the campaign will be somewhat different this time around. In 2000, his resume and reputation lent credibility to a presidential candidate with little experience. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush may not need that kind of endorsement anymore.

“Bush is defined now by his own experience, by what he has done or not done,” said Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster.

To emphasize his national security credentials, the president aims to underline the continuing dangers of terrorism and to keep the memory of the attacks front and center. It often falls to Cheney to handle that task.

“Containment is meaningless in the case of terrorists,” Cheney warned the Arizona veterans. “And neither containment nor deterrence offers protection against an outlaw regime that develops weapons of mass destruction and is willing to pass along those weapons secretly to terrorists on suicide missions.”

Although they often speak the same words, Bush usually sounds more brash than his vice president.

On matters of national security, Cheney tends to come across with the gravitas of a Marcus Welby-like family physician delivering a cancer diagnosis: The situation may be dire, he suggests, but we’ll do everything we can.

Cheney sees himself as a kind of Mr. Worst-Case Scenario, trying to ensure that the administration is prepared for events that were once considered unthinkable.

“So far we’ve been fortunate, and hopefully we’ll continue to be fortunate,” Cheney said in the interview. “It’s to some extent the responsibility, though, of those of us in government to think about the what-ifs, to worry about the worst case, to look at the evidence that’s out there and connect the dots.”

That trait enraptures his fans, but it enrages his critics. Democrats accuse Cheney of driving the administration beyond demonstrable dangers toward hypothetical scenarios, convincing a majority of the American people, for instance, that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda when no connection had yet been established.

“You work the intelligence to the best of your ability,” Cheney said, “to try to anticipate what the enemy is going to do.... You have to also assume, to some extent, that you probably don’t have complete knowledge. You almost never do when you’re dealing in the intelligence area, especially when you’re dealing in the world of international terrorist conspiracies.”

What his fans see as pragmatism, his critics see as warmongering. Democrats and other critics paint Cheney as a dark, insidious force pushing Bush toward war and confrontation. But that doesn’t bother the vice president.

“What’s wrong with my image?” Cheney asks with a laugh. He contends that he operates in public when it serves the administration’s agenda, and in private when that is more effective.

“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asks. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”

When it comes to Cheney, ironies abound. He has spent nearly four decades in Washington -- as a congressman, chief of staff to President Ford and secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration -- but is ideologically antigovernment.

He avoided the draft with an educational deferral, but is popular with the military.

And he is seen as the scholarly, intellectual half of the Bush-Cheney ticket, even though it was the president who graduated from Yale and Harvard, and Cheney from the universities of Wyoming and Wisconsin.

At 62, after four heart attacks, Cheney is expected to be the first vice president since Nelson A. Rockefeller not to seek the presidency.

“This really is my last job,” Cheney said. “I’m not running for anything else.... I’m not out trying to cater to or impress county chairmen in Iowa because I’ve got my own agenda. I’m here specifically to serve as part of [the president’s] team.”

Few question Cheney’s depth of experience. But many question his penchant for secrecy, which has caused problems for the Bush administration.

Cheney is still fighting a lawsuit -- which has reached the Supreme Court -- seeking information about his contacts with the energy industry during the period when he was developing the administration’s energy policy.

His ties to Halliburton, the oil services giant he headed in the 1990s, have drawn accusations of insider dealing especially in light of a recent no-bid Pentagon contract the company won to provide services in Iraq. And he is accused of promoting questionable intelligence to overstate the danger posed by Iraq’s weapons programs.

“Dick Cheney has his fingerprints all over the biggest messes of this administration,” said Debra Deshong, communications director for the Democratic National Committee.

Democrats like Deshong hope that Cheney turns into more of a liability than an asset for the Republican ticket.

But Paul Light, an expert on vice presidents with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, points out that vice presidents rarely change the vote total by more than a percentage point.

“Vice presidents mostly can only do harm, so they tend to be less visible, except with their key constituencies,” Light said. He adds that Cheney has an unusual Teflon quality.

“The thing that continues to amaze me is that Cheney takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” Light said. “He does these things that would have sunk previous vice presidents, and he emerges unscathed.”

Cheney can be expected to concentrate his campaign efforts on the Republican base, which loves that he is a more hard-line conservative than the president. But Cheney says he is ready to take on the Democrats head-to-head when the time is right.

For now, he’s mostly raising money. He can take credit for about $14 million of the Bush-Cheney war chest of $130 million, not to mention numerous appearances at state and local GOP events.

But there are also signs that Cheney is brushing up his campaign skills. At his World Affairs Council speech in Los Angeles, he accepted questions from the audience.

During a visit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Cheney worked a rope line, shaking hands with scientists who eagerly stretched their hands across a line of blue road barriers.

“We expect it will be a good, hard-fought campaign,” Cheney said. “We assume it will be close. That’s the only safe way to run. But I think we expect to win.”