The moment that Vice President Dick Cheney gave his public endorsement of John McCain and Sarah Palin for president and vice president on Saturday, the Obama campaign talked it up and went to work producing a commercial touting it.
It’s understandable why the Obama folks would want to call attention to Cheney’s nod for McCain and Palin. Cheney has even lower approval ratings than President Bush and viewed suspiciously by Americans for his secretiveness, his alleged tweaking of intelligence reports supporting the invasion of Iraq, and his connections to Halliburton and the entire oil industry.
What’s less understandable, maybe, is why Cheney decided to go public with his endorsement. After all, it’s to be expected that a lifelong Republican pol like Cheney would vote for his party’s White House ticket. There’s nothing newsworthy in that, really.
But Cheney isn’t stupid. While he may still wow a portion of his party, he holds no sway with the critical undecideds. In fact, quite the opposite, Dick Cheney is electoral poison. His endorsement was sure to have elicited the very cackles from the Obama campaign and silence from the McCain people that we’ve seen. In short, Dick Cheney must have known that his endorsement would do nothing to help John McCain nor sate the public’s desire to know what he thinks about Team McCain.
So, why on earth did Dick Cheney go public on the Saturday before the biggest election in our lifetimes?
One thought crossed my mind, which may be a bit Machiavellian.
The fact is that Dick Cheney loathes John McCain. McCain went after the Bush Administration for what he saw as its incompetent conduct of the war in Iraq. Maybe even more unforgivable from Cheney’s viewpoint was McCain’s criticisms of the Bush Administration’s incarceration and interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. These are not minor differences of opinion. By many reports, Cheney holds McCain in utter contempt for his positions on these matters.
Is it too far-fetched to consider the possibility that Dick Cheney, convinced that his old nemesis is going to lose anyway and knowing that he himself is political Kryptonite, decided to administer whatever hurt he might inflict on John McCain, kicking him down the stairs at the eleventh hour of a tough campaign? Don’t you think he knew that his endorsement would do a lot more harm to John McCain than it would help him?
It doesn’t seem outrageous to consider that Cheney decided to share his bad reputation with the US electorate to give John McCain an even more miserable November 4, than he’s otherwise likely to have.
But then, this is the crazy season of presidential campaigns and, in that context, even the most bizarre of scenarios seem plausible. In a few days, we may all return to normal…Whatever that is.
[UPDATE: If you’re on Facebook, check out the debate my link to this post has engendered over there. (11/3/08, 1:52PM EST]
[I didn’t post on this topic on my personal blog. But you will find 112 posts on the 2008 presidential election there.]