Vice President Cheney Unwittingly Reveals
GOP Contempt For Average American Voters

By William Finucane

Dour faced, monotoned, not at all a riveting speaker, Vice President Dick Cheney was recently plodding through another of his campaign dissertations to a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa. But then he hit them with a quote that was unbelievable, and it woke a lot of people up and stirred the national debate.

"It is absolutely essential that…on Nov. 2 we make the right choice," Cheney said, "because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating."

At first the comment made little stir, since it was – as always – given in a speech to which only Republicans, or people who had declared support for the GOP, were admitted. But then it started to gain notoriety.

It was clear that the vice president of the United States was saying that if he and President George W. Bush somehow lose the Nov. 2nd presidential election, then it is virtually certain terrorists will hit America more witheringly than they had on Sept. 11, 2001. The expectation of such an attack was absolute and unequivocal.

There was no "maybe" or "probably" in this statement by Mr. Cheney. His only modifier is that "the danger is" that the United States will suffer a "devastating" blow if American voters don’t choose the ‘right’ path, ironic pun intended.

In other words, Vice President Cheney predicted terrorism if he and Mr. Bush should lose this election. He actually predicted a terrorist attack.

Mr. Cheney failed to say what is obvious; the attack on America could also come if Bush wins, but that omission is hardly surprising. What is shocking is the scare tactics that Mr. Cheney, and clearly Mr. Bush and the GOP in general, are willing to utilize to assure election. The tactic also seems to reflect a certain contempt for average Americans, since it assumes that Americans are so timid and afraid, and so committed to security at all costs, that the very thought that the only thing keeping them from attack is the GOP and its policies will seem plausible to average voters.

According to Mr. Cheney, regardless of what the Democratic candidate John Kerry might or might not do as President, if Kerry wins there will be a brutal attack on the U.S. because Bush lost his second presidential election.

This is clearly preposterous.

Unless Cheney can claim that he is in contact with Osama bin Laden or his surrogates and therefore he knows Al Qaeda’s plans, he cannot make this statement.

Cheney also seems to know, somehow, that it’s only if the Democrats are elected that this thundering blow will be wrought upon America.

The arrogance of Mr. Cheney in his statements surpasses even the rhetoric of the post Revolutionary War period, when the successful revolutionaries were struggling to create a lasting nation with their own imprints writ large upon it. But even then, they did not suggest that the success of their political enemies would result in immediate attack upon the fledging country.

However, it is possible to find some political rhetoric that can be considered in the same general category as Mr. Cheney’s comments, but it is necessary to look back to the period immediately before the Civil War. Mr. Cheney’s political approach is not greatly dissimilar from that of the Southern aristocracy that ultimately brought about America’s second revolution; that is, the creation of the Confederacy – the Confederate States of America, CSA - and its attempt to break away from the union and create a separate country, which resulted in the greatest bloodshed ever seen on this continent.

Vice-President Cheney’s inflamed rhetoric is false in every manner, but it is more calculated than stupid or blindly arrogant. Mr. Cheney has charged the Democrats with holding national security in their hands, and if the analogy is carried to its logical conclusion, the only way they could save the United States is if they quietly put down their arguments and back off quickly from any opposition to the GOP.

But assuming the obvious – that the Democrats won’t embrace the assumption that they will bring terrorism with any victory of their own – who is left to intimidate; only the average American voter.

Enter Mr. Cheney, who has declared that to vote for anyone other than the Bush/Cheney ticket is inviting harm to oneself, or to one’s family, and beyond that it might be considered treasonous.

That extrapolation might sound a bit far fetched; but it isn’t. Cheney is saying exactly that. Listen to what he is saying: Choose our candidates or risk attack. Just how wrong did that sound?

Within a few days, Cheney came under some blistering criticism.

Interestingly, one of the strongest critiques came from Colin L. Powell. The secretary of state said: "There is no commander in chief who would not respond to terrorism." He clearly implied that if Mr. Kerry were president, Kerry’s assumption of executive responsibility would not be a signal for an increased opportunity for terrorism, and that if Kerry were the president he would act in response to any threat.

Secretary of State Powell, of course, has held other jobs that are pertinent to his ability to judge the bizarre remarks of Mr. Cheney. Powell was a four-star general. From 1989 to 1993 he served as the 12^th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest rank attainable in any service within the Department of Defense.

In that job, Powell ran Operation Desert Storm during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when George Bush the elder was president and Saddam Hussein was first declared as the foremost enemy of the free world. In short, it is reasonable to suggest that Powell might have a tad more knowledge than Mr. Cheney regarding how the Middle East combatants might act, and how their terrorist elements could react to a change in the American leadership.

Of Kerry, Powell said, "I can’t tell you how he might respond to it. As commander in chief, I think he’d respond to it in a robust way."

Obviously any handover of power from one president to the next, even if the two top executives are friends, must have strong security. In today’s world, that need is only enhanced. There must be people from the incoming and outgoing administrations on hand for quite a while to ensure, as much as is humanly possible, that no sneak attack is scheduled or possible during the transition of power. Such a careful transfer of power is the very illustration of how successfully a democracy can function.

Ex-general Powell knows all of this, and his approach seems to have been aimed simply at getting this ‘quote thing’ of Mr. Cheney back in the bottle; in other words, to clean up Cheney’s mess. Ironically, Cheney himself tried to straighten it out.

Doing an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer shortly after the Des Moines speech, Cheney said he needed to "clean up" the earlier statements.

"I did not say if Kerry is elected we will be hit by a terrorist attack," said Cheney. "Whoever is elected president has to anticipate more attacks."

What an interesting reversal, all based on shading what had been said, apparently assuming no one would remember that he had declared: "It is absolutely essential that…on Nov. 2 we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating."

But why should we be surprised or upset at such a remark; after all, the candidates seem free to use all sorts of lies or half-lies on each other during a campaign. This is knockdown politics, isn’t it?

Well, maybe not this time. Suggesting that a change of leadership threatens security is quite different from other political discourse.

So Mr. Cheney explains that what he was trying to get at was that Bush’s plan for dealing with all of this is better than Kerry’s plan – that’s all. Ahhh, it’s all as plain as it can possibly be; this whole thing was over a slip of the Cheney tongue, wasn’t it?

Perhaps not: Remember, Cheney is not a dunderhead.

He knows how words work. Here, they were and are used to terrify people. At other times, he can be downright soft on issues. Being gay is his prime example, since personal knowledge seems to have prevented him from arbitrarily adhering to the GOP line against Gay men and women. Mr. Cheney has a straight daughter and he has a gay daughter, and he loves them both, which is obviously admirable. Both have his blessing to live their own sexual lives.

So in all respects, Cheney is not a stupid candidate, and few if any would suggest otherwise, no matter what their individual political affiliation.

Was the statement about America being hit with another attack if Kerry and Edwards are elected an unfortunate gaffe?

No, it wasn’t.

It was carefully aimed to raise the nation’s basest fears and to connect them with Kerry. Campaign speeches are designed to hurt opponents. But this one went too far.

Vice President Cheney told the carefully vetted audience of Republicans and GOP supporters that everyone else who would consider voting against him and Mr. Bush would actually threaten the nation’s very existence.

That is a lie on Americans, not on Kerry.

It can’t be erased by some public relations follow-up. Mr. Cheney has crossed a line and has indicated that only his political party can protect America. He has also shown an amoral contempt for American citizens by asserting that for the first time since the Civil War they should break away from other Americans who do not support a certain point of view. And he is employing fear as his driving force.

Make no mistake about it, this was not a casual remark or merely an overstatement. Despite Mr. Cheney’s later "clean up" of the speech, the original declaration did deliver the message he wanted to get over to the Republicans.

Des Moines was a campaign stump speech; a leap at the opponent’s jugular vein, and subsequent attempts to paint it differently are, to say the least, disingenuous. Mr. Cheney could have developed all sorts of accusations against Kerry himself, as the GOP has been striving to do everywhere possible, but this was different: Vice President Cheney not only asserted that the Democrats and their candidates, John Kerry and John Edwards, are such that their very election will result in a terrorist attack, but he painted all non-Republicans as potential traitors if they don’t vote for the GOP.

So Secretary of State Colin Powell had to play referee.

Whether it was Powell’s intent to or not, he butted heads with Cheney. Honor, it seems, is more important to Powell than Cheney’s election. Powell has been an Army man all his adult life, where concepts like duty, honor and truth retain an actual and practical meaning. Even in the midst of a furious political donnybrook, Powell apparently could not let his own leaders get away with such flat lies.

Like a seasoned editor working with a polemical reporter, Powell tried to smooth over Cheney’s words. At the same time, Powell reiterated that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and another plane that was brought down in Pennsylvania. Powell made his remarks on NBC’s "Meet the Press."

Powell had to take questions from real reporters and answer them on the spot. In contrast, Mr. Bush himself finds this sort of free flow of question and answer information gathering difficult. So he holds very, very few press conferences and now he just appears before crowds of screened Republicans or GOP supporters, many of whom – and sometimes all who attend – must sign statements that are essentially loyalty oaths. It appears obvious that Mr. Bush would be comfortable if only he could run the government hidden away in that manner, secluded from hard questions and surrounded by supporters and true believers, both in his day to day office functions and in all public appearances.

But there are still reporters.

And there is a Constitution, still, despite Bush’s attempts to trample all over it.

Those two factors have slowed but not stymied the GOP in what increasingly appears to be an attempt to assume one-party power in America.

Clearly this is a crucial election. In that regard, Mr. Cheney is correct. But the fact that he and Mr. Bush seem to believe that to retain power it is necessary to rattle war sabers and play to the lowest common denominator – fear – among the general public is a warning bell of clarion proportions to everyone who believes in democracy with a small ‘d.’ This is shaping up as the most challenging election contest in modern history.