Jon Meacham: Dick Cheney should run in 2012
Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama’s unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.
In 1988 I wrote in a college magazine that George Herbert Walker Bush had a mandate from the voters. Somehow my editors inserted “not” into the lede (correct spelling), quite turning my commentary on its head. An election is a mandate, no matter how discouraging the results, so I was a bit angry over the alleged “typo.” The point of my article was that Democrats needed to give Bush a chance; they needed to work with the president, not against him. They didn’t have to agree with him on every policy, but neither stand in his way.
Today, many conservatives feel Obama is a lost cause — “can’t work with him” — and, as a result, they are largely marginalized. Waiting until 2012 is not the answer as much will happen between then and now. Conservatives too need to work with the president.
What I appreciate about Meacham’s commentary is not so much the idea of a Cheney candidacy (Cheney doesn’t stand a chance in 2012), but the idea of voters finally acknowledging that an election is a mandate. Perhaps then politicians would actually care what voters thought.
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© 2009, Mark Adams. All rights reserved. For inquiries press here.
