The GOP on Iraq: They Made a Desert and Called It Peace

“It’s not like we haven’t seen over the last five or six months these terrorists moving in, taking control of Western Iraq. Now they’ve taken control of Mosul. They’re 100 miles from Baghdad. And what’s the president doing? Taking a nap!”—John Boehner (pictured), R-Ohio, Speaker of the House, during a news conference at the Capitol, quoted in John Parkinson, "John Boehner Slams President Obama for ‘Taking a Nap’ on Iraq,” The Note (ABC News), June 12, 2014

Somebody please tell John Boehner that, if he’s at all serious about what he says about Iraq, he’ll put down that golf club he loves so well, then pick up a rifle he can use over in Iraq. Barring that, he should stop his nonsense about what President Obama isn’t doing in that troubled nation that shows all signs of no longer being a “nation” in any sense in the future.

That talk about “taking a nap” is pretty rich, for instance, coming from a party that still venerates a Republican President of 30 years ago who was rather famous for the same pastime. (Yes, it was The Gipper whose practice of leaving the Oval Office by 2:30 pm each Friday for R&R ed the West Wing to schedule that slot as “Staff Time’—or, as some wags put it, “Staff Time for Bonzo.”)

But there are other problems with Boehner’s statement.

Let’s start with the ultimate responsibility for this situation, shall we? In a Vice-Presidential debate of 1976, Bob Dole raised many hackles by referring to “Democrat wars.” Leave aside the offense to grammar and examine his point: World Wars I and I, as well as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, began with Democrats in office.

If the GOP could cheer Dole for that statement, then surely turnabout is fair play, and the Democrats have more than enough right to refer to Iraq as a “Republican War.” It began under George W. Bush; in the House of Representatives, 213 out of 296 votes for the resolution authorizing Presidential use of force in Iraq came from Republicans; and in the early days of the war, when things appeared to be going swimmingly, GOP candidates, under the guidance of strategist Karl Rove, were not shy about bludgeoning Democratic opponents of the conflict, even ousting a wounded Vietnam War vet, Senator Max Cleland, in the process.

Second, the war did not end up going as advertised, has it? The Bush administration outmaneuvered, outmuscled, and, when all else failed, muzzled those who questioned whether enough troops would be available to secure Iraq, a country of 31 million people with traditions profoundly different from ours. One of these questioners was General Eric Shinseki, and GOP lawmakers must share responsibility for his mistreatment for not protesting his dismissal from command because of the issue. (They still couldn’t stand the knowledge that events proved him right—one of the reasons they made him the scapegoat for longstanding bipartisan failures at the Veterans Administration, when he joined the Obama administration to head the department.)

No, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, despite their longstanding conservative skepticism about government’s ability to do anything right, were sure that theirs could erect an island of pluralistic democracy in a region with nothing close to this tradition. It would be like Douglas MacArthur in Japan in 1945 all over again. MacArthur’s staff, however, not only planned for this contingency but proceeded to carry it out. In contrast, as James Fallows demonstrated in an article for The Atlantic Monthly a decade ago, the Bush administration went “Blind Into Baghdad” by ignoring the plans already in place. It was a case of let the chips fall where they may, the foreign-policy counterpart to the casino capitalism that would leave the American economy in tatters by the end of Bush’s second term.

For more than three years, the Bush administration ignored the tell-tale signs that disorder was spreading in Iraq. Their apologists, notably the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, point to the quiescent state achieved by 2009, after the removal of Rumsfeld at the Defense Department and the subsequent implementation of Gen. David Petreus’ “surge.” Everything that happened since then was Obama’s fault.

All of this constitutes history as wishful thinking.

The GOP, scenting blood in the water as they scan daily headlines about Obama’s poll standings, fevered by the thought of something else to bludgeon the President with besides Benghazi, online Obamacare, the IRS and the Veterans Administration, think they are going in for the kill on Iraq. In fact, they are engaged in massive overkill on this issue.

As someone with no particular brief for the GOP, but a strong believer in a two-party system, I can’t urge the elders of the Republican Party strongly enough to stop pursuing this avenue back to the White House.

Many in the party probably consider this as golden an opportunity as the “Who lost China?” debate ignited during the administration of Harry Truman. But the difference between the 1940s and this past decade reveals at a glance why the analogy is worthless.

The GOP could charge (albeit recklessly) that Truman and his State Department were responsible for the fall of China to the Communists because their party was nowhere within smelling distance of the White House for a generation—from 1932 to 1952—and, therefore, their fingerprints could be found nowhere on the corpse of the government of Chiang Kai-shek. But the first six, formative years of the Iraq War all took place under GOP auspices.

One Republican who has failed to draw the proper lessons of history is, not surprisingly, Dick Cheney. Dubya, having painted his successor into a diplomatic and economic corner, is, to give him credit, content now to stick with real brushes and canvasses and not make a noise on every occasion. Not so his Veep. This past week, in an op-ed piece (co-written with daughter Liz) for The Wall Street Journal that bids fair to become the most overheated pronouncement by any White House official in the last century, Cheney writes: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

Leave aside the cheap-imitation Churchillian rhetoric. Even leave aside (though it’s going to be harder) the idea of a man who requested and received five student deferments in the Vietnam War deciding events 40 years later “at the expense of so many.” No, what is galling (no other word remotely suffices) about all of this is that, after being loudly, completely, and repeatedly wrong about the course of events a decade ago in Iraq, Cheney expects to be taken seriously a decade later. But then again, this is the same man who, though never seeing a second of combat himself, told his boss that refusing to pardon aide “Scooter” Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice charges was like “leaving a soldier on the battlefield.”

You would expect liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne to call Cheney out on this. But the surprise last week was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who, following her smackdown of Karl Rove’s delusional Presidential election predictions a year and a half ago, has now burnished her reputation as the one figure at her cable colossus who, at least once in a blue moon, is willing to say that the pronouncements of some conservatives are simply too rich for her blood.

"Time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir,” Kelly told Cheney on the air last week. “You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005, and you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to 'rethink their strategy of jihad.' Now, with almost a trillion dollars spent there, with almost 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?"

In their eagerness to lambaste Obama, Cheney, Boehner and much of the rest of their party have conveniently forgotten one major player: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Where do you start with his follies? With the decision to push the U.S. out of his country, without any treaty provision that would leave even a residual American military force? With a turn toward the Islamist regime in Iran, the longtime enemy of his nation? With the alienation of his nation’s Sunnis? With human-rights violations that sound like another Saddam Hussein in embryo? (As Amnesty International listed them, as summarized by Justin Marozzi for The Huffington Post: “peaceful protesters shot dead, thousands of detentions, hundreds of death sentences after unfair trials, dozens of executions, torture and ill treatment ‘rife.’”)

The result of all these actions by al-Maliki, the man whose name the Republicans dare not say? After a decade in which Americans tried assiduously to train them to take over the defense of their own country, more than 200,000 active-duty Iraqi soldiers crumbled in the face of a mere 4,000 fighters with The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). It is like the slew of South Vietnamese leaders who squandered U.S. lives and largesse in the Vietnam War through their own corruption and incompetence, leaving a force that crumbled within a couple of years after the last American soldier went home.

I am not much of a fan of President Obama. He was far too timorous about reforming the excesses of Wall Street after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and fumbling the rollout of online Obamacare mercilessly exposed his managerial failures. He has only one real saving grace, though it is not minor in the current crisis: his small-minded political enemies (after all, they regard him as such, rather than as a rival) make him look far larger and more adult by comparison.

For 20 years after the onset of the Great Depression, Americans judged GOP performance in relation to that economic calamity as so wanting that they did not elect a Republican for President. Shouldn’t a similar dismal performance in the Oval Office on a comparable horror show in the foreign-policy realm warrant a similar judgment today?

The ancient historian Tacitus depicted a barbarian leader rallying his soldiers by warning them of the consequences if the Romans won: “They make a desert and call it peace.” At this point, it’s fair to say that the Republicans have made a desert and called it Iraq.

This Day in Presidential History (Reagan Aides Circle Wagons Over “Iranamok”)

November 25, 1986—Only a dozen years after a Republican President was forced out of office because of scandal, the possibility became a live one again when Attorney General Edwin Meese not only admitted that Ronald Reagan had authorized arms for hostages, but broke the news that at least one member of the National Security Council had used at least proceeds from the weapons shipments to fund the contras opposing the Marxist government of Daniel Ortega.

History has dubbed the scandal that consumed the attention of the nation for the following nine months Iran-contra—a clumsy name whose sole virtue might be that it attempted to capture the wide-ranging nature of an astonishing series of events. But there’s another name for the scandal, coined by the liberal magazine The New Republic, that is pithy while conveying the insane quality of the whole affair: “Iranamok.”

At a reading of Democracy at New York’s 92^nd Street Y a year or two after the scandal broke, Joan Didion remarked that one plot element in her novel was a what-if scenario—i.e., what if Lee Hart and General Richard Secord had an affair? Both these names have faded from the public consciousness, but Secord is one of many names in Iran-contra that should not be forgotten, even as the nation has turned its attention to recent events considered more momentous (the War on Terror) and trivial (Herman Cain’s confusion about President Obama’s Libya policy—and his own position on the matter).

Iranamok was built on an entire network of deceit, starting with the Reagan administration’s blithe assurances that they were complying with Congress’ Boland Amendment restricting CIA and Defense Department support of the opposition contra forces in Nicaragua. But perhaps none reached the level of the claim by Lt. Colonel OliverNorth (self-confessed liar turned preposterous American folk hero) that as he moved outside the realm of accountability to the American public, he had to balance “lies versus lives.”

In a word, no. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever analyzed how the statement, already dubious when first expressed, has become more dubious with each passing day. The threat that the Reagan Administration saw was not in the Mideast but in Central America, which, in their fevered version, was in danger of seeing Nicaragua become another Cuban-style center for Marxism.

But the idea that Nicaragua ever posed a threat to the U.S. was ludicrous. Say what you want about about the Patriot Act, but it was passed in an environment in which several thousand Americans had died in an unprovoked terror attack and there was every possibility that another would occur sooner rather than later. Not only did the Communists of Nicaragua never launch such an attack, but nobody in his right mind ever believed it would. Even Ortega’s opportunity to create mischief around Latin America was becoming increasingly limited. For all the resources that the Reagan administration was pouring into the CIA, the news never really seemed to move up the ladder that the U.S.S.R. was being undermined from within by the costs of its involvement in Afghanistan and the struggle to keep its own restless republics in line. (Maybe this intelligence never went up the line because it contradicted everything they had believed for 40 years.) The U.S.S.R., under these circumstances, was finding it harder and harder to export Marxism into the region.

Instead, Americans looking at their newscasts 25 years ago were astounded to find that the President who spoke about “standing tall” against foreign threats--including famously, in the 1980 election, vowing not to negotiate with terrorists--had made a deal with hostage-takers and state sponsors of terrorism in Iran. Following the arms shipment, the three hostages released were immediately followed by another three taken. Secretary of State George Schultz, who had opposed the deal, was correct in calling it “a hostage bazaar.”

The Tower Commission, appointed the day after Meese’s revelation of the diversion of funds from the arms sale to the contras, gave the Reagan administration a tremendous gift when it attributed the crisis to Reagan’s lax “management style.” The commission's report gave Americans still traumatized by the impeachment crisis of 1974 the opportunity to believe that laws were broken by a President not because of his criminality but because he was disengaged from the government he headed. The impression of disengagement (fostered by the President's own frequent jokes about his not-too-stringent work habits as well as his advanced age) enabled Reagan to escape the impeachment that doomed Richard Nixon on Capitol Hill. But, as Theodore Draper argued compellingly in his analysis of the labyrinthine scandal, A Very Thin Line, Reagan bears responsibility because of his twin obsession with freeing the hostages (even if it meant denying he was dealing with terrorists) and with keeping together the contras “body and soul.”

In a very real sense, a line can be drawn from Iran-contra to the disastrous chain of events that led the Bush II administration to beat the drums of war on the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. One of the forgotten but astonishing aspects of Iran-contra was the excessive dependence on a purported go-between to alleged Iranian moderates who failed 13 out of 15 questions on a polygraph test. Similarly, the Iraqi defector nicknamed “Curveball” concocted stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. In both the Iran-contra and weapons of mass destruction fiascoes, ideological fervor led policymakers to place too much credence in sources that clearly did not warrant the slightest trust.

One last thing: Iran-contra can not only be seen as yet another of the scandals to which modern American Presidents have found themselves inevitably drawn, but also as a marker in the Red-vs.-Blue State divide that has plagued our government in recent years. The tumultuous Bork confirmation hearings have often been cited as a milestone in the latter regard, but the Iran-contra investigation, occurring at roughly the same time, serves as an equally compelling example. To understand why the supercommittee has had super trouble taming the deficit, it doesn't hurt to look back here.

The House Judiciary Committee in 1974 would never have been able to form a critical mass of committee members against Richard Nixon if the panel’s conservative Southern Democrats and moderate Northern Republicans had not made common cause. By the time of Iran-contra, the Inouye select joint House-Senate committee charged with investigating Iran-contra had become far more starkly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

One of the key GOP members of the latter panel was Rep. Dick Cheney, who was so nakedly partisan that even fellow GOP member Warren Rudman observed that he was “more interested in protecting the president than in finding out what had happened.“ Cheney later claimed to be annoyed at how junior members of the Reagan administration were “left out to dry.” Years later, that anger would inform his wrongheaded urging of President George W. Bush to pardon Scooter Libby on the dubious grounds that abandoning him would be like leaving behind a soldier on the battlefield. (A most interesting metaphorical stretch, especially considering that Cheney never spent a day in the armed forces.) Furthermore, an additional aim while on the select committee--preserving Presidential prerogative--became one Cheney pursued perhaps even more ardently, and with equally disastrous results, while serving as Vice-President.

The Iran-contra investigation was a muddle that settled nothing and simply left lying around for later Presidential use the possibility of a secret government-within-a-government. No Democrat or Republican should permit the existence of such a principle that undermines the system of accountability.

This Day in Theater History (“Hello, Dolly!” Opens)

January 16, 1964—Look at the old girl now, fellas: The musical Hello, Dolly! opened at the St. James Theater, the first of 2,844 performances that would make it, for a brief period, the longest-running Broadway show of all time.

The show, with a book by Michael Stewart, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, and directed by Gower Champion, won 10 out of 11 Tony Awards for which it was nominated, not only for all the aforementioned but for actress Carol Channing, who made it one of her two signature roles (the other being Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes).

The plot of Hello, Dolly! concerns a middle-aged matchmaker whose latest job proves to be the most self-serving of her career. Assigned to find a mate for a middle-aged man with extensive requirements, she proposes candidates for his hand, all the while calculating how she can undermine their prospects while improving her own for the exact same position. In the end she succeeds, walking off with the crowning glory of her career: a rich, powerful man a little befuddled about how he got himself into this position.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hmmm…Where have I heard that before? I know—it must be from one of the following sources”:

* A one-act farce by the English John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent (1835)
* Johann Nestroy’s 1842 comedy Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, taking the same situation--a clerk in a merchant’s shop—and expanding it to a full-length play.
* Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers, which translated the action from Europe to upstate New York in the 1880s.
* Wilder’s 1954 revision of the above, The Matchmaker, starring Ruth Gordon, which benefited from director Tyrone Guthrie’s shrewd suggestion to focus on a minor character in Wilder’s original: the widow Dolly Gallagher Levi.
* The musical triumph for Channing, not only on Broadway but revived twice more, in 1978 and 1995, with the actress.
* The musical warhorse that continued on the Great White Way for another six years, with Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller and Ethel Merman succeeding Channing in the role.
* The show brought over to entertain troops in Vietnam, starring Mary Martin.
* A 1969 film version starring a much-too-young Barbra Streisand (fresh off her Funny Girl Oscar) and featuring uncharacteristically flat-footed direction from the immortal cinematic hoofer Gene Kelly.
* The 2006 Paper Mill Playhouse version, in which Tovah Feldshuh offered a radically different—but to me, certainly credible—take on the role: Dolly as a poor Irish girl out to make good and do well. (Otherwise, how did she get that name Gallagher?)

All of these are perfectly understandable sources for where you might have heard of the plot. But there’s another, more recent instance that you’re not remembering. Come on…You can do it…

Give up? Let me offer two words of help: Dick Cheney. Listen carefully:

As Cheney ends eight years that made him one of the most controversial—and surely the most powerful—Vice-President in American history, memories dim on how he won his job in the first place. It was the most unorthodox route taken by any Vice-Presidential nominee in, oh, the last three decades or so, when the norm has been not only checking potential Veep choices with a fine-tooth comb but also extensive interviews of these hopefuls by the President and his handlers.

As told in Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, Cheney took himself out of the running for the 2000 Vice-Presidential sweepstakes early when George W. Bush asked him about his willingness to take the job. Though impressing Dubya with the man’s selflessness, it was actually the kind of bat-her-eyelashes gambit at which Dolly Gallagher Levi excelled.

Then the GOP nominee, doubly awed by the vast experience of one of his dad’s Cabinet members as well as his self-effacing attitude, asked, like rich, smug Horace Vandergelder, that Cheney find him a mate—a running mate, if we must be technical. Now, Cheney’s strategy became truly Dolly-like.

As he pored over the financial and other background information provided by the 2000 Vice-Presidential hopefuls—Oklahoma Gov. Keating, Michigan Gov. John Engler, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, New York Gov. George Pataki and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth—Cheney knew every one of their weaknesses. Somehow, these became increasingly highlighted in his summaries to Bush. One by one, just like Dolly’s selections for Vandergelder, they fell by the wayside.

Finally, Dubya posed the question: would Cheney reconsider his earlier rejection of the post? Cheney went back into full-dress Dolly mode, asking if he could talk it over with his wife. Shortly thereafter, he came back with his answer, Molly Bloom-style: yes he would, yes yes yes yes….

The upshot of this was extraordinary. Unlike the men on the GOP Veep short list, Cheney did not submit to a background check, because he’d done all the sifting. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pinpointed the irony of the situation perfectly: It was like a judge at a beauty pageant picking herself as the winner!

Where did Cheney come up with this brilliant stratagem? Well, before he went in a big way for his master-of-the-political-and-business-universe role, maybe Cheney, like young men generally do, came to New York as a tourist. If he wanted to see a Broadway show in 1964, there were two musicals with diametrically opposed attitudes toward life and audience-pleasing from which he might have chosen.

On one side there was Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. True, Cheney would have had to move awfully fast to see it (it closed after nine performances, offering a preview of the cult-failure pattern that characterized most of Sondheim's subsequent career). But if he got lucky, he might have seen this show about a scheming mayor of a small town.

But God, the titles of some of those songs: “Everybody Says Don’t,” “See Where It Gets You,” “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “With So Little To Be Sure Of.” If you’re an up-and-comer from the West with eyes on getting ahead in government, does this depressing stuff sound like the way to get ahead?

On the other hand, you had the musical by Jerry Herman, who not only beat out Sondheim for the Tony for Best Score this year but, even more controversially, two decades later, when Le Cage aux Folles edged out the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park With George.

Well, with its brassy approach to problem-solving and its disdain for the existential handwringing exemplified by Sondheim, Hello, Dolly! was as guaranteed to please a Western young-man-in-a-hurry as it was Tony voters. And that plot—why, it offered as much of a blueprint to succeed as the way-to-wealth maxims memorized by another young man from west of the Mississippi, James Gatz, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Just think: This sunniest of Broadway musicals provided a template for getting one way’s way for one of DC’s reigning power brokers. Think what Herman, Wilder, Nestroy, and Oxenford—not to mention the irrepressible Miss Channing!—have to answer for!

Quotes of the Day (on Developments in the Vice-Presidency)

“But as for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me what is it, exactly, that the V.P. does every day?”—Alaska Gov. (and future Vice-Presidential candidate) Sarah Palin, appearing on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company”, July 31, 2008

“I’m sure that there will be discrete assignments over time. But I think his fundamental role is as a trusted counselor. I think that when Obama selected him, he selected him to be a counselor and an adviser on a broad range of issues.--David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, on Joe Biden’s projected role as Vice-President, quoted by Helene Cooper, “For Biden, No Portfolio But the Role of a Counselor,” The New York Times, Nov. 25, 2008

"Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again."—Thomas Marshall, Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson, on his office

Palin’s inexperience, in and of itself, was enough to make me cast my vote against John McCain and for Barack Obama. But I think The New Republic erred in listing the quote above from her as part of its “Case Against Sarah Palin.” In her artlessly phrased way, she brought to the surface a real question that every administration faces—what to do with the Vice-President?

She came in for a fair amount of criticism during the campaign for her televised response to a third-quarter’s question about what Vice-Presidents do: “[T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.”

Okay, this is a turkey of a statement, since the Constitution’s sole sentence on the responsibilities of the Vice-President is the following: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

But you know what? The way I figure it is this: Every politician, no matter how seemingly sharp, says or does at least one thing in his career so astoundingly idiotic that it takes the breath away. Russell Baker, for instance, recalled seeing Adlai Stevenson shake hands with a department store mannequin. The way I figure it, politicians are entitled to at least one mulligan to cover such contingencies.

Not to mention that this is the holiday season. So in the season’s spirit of charity, I’m going to take a page from President Bush’s book (the closest book he’s come to in awhile, I’ll reckon!) and pardon this turkey.

In fact, in the best bipartisan tradition I’m going to pardon a second turkey: Governor Palin’s opponent for the Vice-Presidency, Joe Biden, who came out with this whopper in an interview with Katie Couric in September: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

(I’m sure Joe’s handlers—not to mention hundreds of my fellow bloggers—reminded him of the following after this statement: a) It was Herbert Hoover, not FDR, who was around at the time of the stock market crash—a fact of which the Democratic Party successfully reminded the electorate for the following 20 years; b) FDR did not appear on TV until 1939, for the World’s Fair that year; c) Because TV did not develop as a mass medium for nearly another decade after that, the medium the President mastered was radio.)

Look, we know what Joe meant. We know what Sarah meant. Still, this past election might have been the first in which whoever became Vice-President would have duct tape placed over their mouths to prevent further gaffes.

You don’t have to believe me, though. Take a look at Axelrod’s quote above, and especially that word “counselor.” It sounds, to these ears, an awful lot like another “C” word used often in the business world: “consultant.” It’s the term that a number of companies use for executives unceremoniously “transitioned” out the door. These former execs have little to do except twiddle their thumbs while picking up a paycheck.

Axelrod’s “counselor” role sounds like at least a partial reversion to the old role played by Vice-Presidents. Again, we come back to Vice-President Marshall, who, in the frustrating months after Woodrow Wilson’s devastating stroke, noted that “the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president."

Beginning with the greater role that Jimmy Carter gave Walter Mondale, the increasing Presidential practice has been to award Vice-Presidents significant responsibility.

Dick Cheney’s Voldemortian abuse of his wide-ranging portfolio in the departing administration, however, inspired widespread, you might even say bipartisan, revulsion. Even John McCain noted that he was inclined to scale sharply back on the responsibilities of his V-P—without, of course, making the office a nullity once again.

Given this recent history, along with the “team of rivals” envisioned by President-elect Obama for his Cabinet, including Hilary Clinton and Bill Richardson, do you think there’s going to be a significant role for Biden?

Do you think that, given Biden’s penchant for gaffes—or what The New York Times, in the same charitable spirit that the CEO of this blog is displaying, “his voluble past”—that the Obama administration is going to allow him out for much more than the occasional funeral for a head of state?

Do you think that, given how little the Constitution specifically says about the Veep’s duties, that they are going to extend further than Obama’s (still abundant, let’s grant) who-knows-how-long affection and patience for the Senate warhorse who’s now a heartbeat away from him?

Stay tuned, as Gov. Palin’s query about what a Vice-President does all day becomes newly relevant.