Cheney "The Man Behind The Curtain"
On July 25, 2000, George W. Bush sat in an upstairs room of the governor's mansion in Austin watching Dick Cheney navigate his first television interview as the Republican vice presidential nominee. "Just mark my words," an admiring Bush gushed to an aide. "There will be a crisis in my administration, and Dick Cheney is exactly the man you want at your side in a crisis."Loads more at the link.
...The problem, according to some Republican insiders, is that Cheney reinforces the president's conservative instincts, pulling him to the right at a time when voters seem more interested in a centrist approach. A senior adviser to a former Republican president adds: "Cheney is not always right, but he's always certain. He and his allies thought they were invincible, that this would be the American century, that we could reshape the world any way we wanted to. Welcome to the real world."
Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who helped strengthen the modern vice presidency under Jimmy Carter, told U.S. News: "Cheney is very able, and he's spent a lot of years in government. . . . Bush has had none of that, and he doesn't seem to be energetically serious about mastering the central subjects. . . . If Bush is not filling those knowledge voids, somebody has to fill the vacuum"--and that appears to be Cheney.
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