Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, thinks Dick Cheney running for president would be a good idea. The reason?
A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions.
Didn't we already do that? Wasn't it called, uhm, the election of 2008?
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.
That was true of Republicans during Democratic administrations, but not vice versa. During the Bush administration, the Democrats were very nearly as supine for Bush as the Republicans were.
A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama's unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.
Where has Meacham been? The American public made that decision last year. Looks like the interventionist crowd wants a do-over. Typical.
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