New York
DICK CHENEY'S SPEECH captured an essential difference between George W. Bush and John Kerry. It's the difference between an experienced executive and an experienced legislator, between a man who for almost four years now has been vested with, and had to act pursuant to, "the executive power," as the Constitution describes it, and a man who has spent the past 20 years as a senator, sharing with 99 others in the legislative powers assigned to the upper chamber. Executive power and legislative power are quite different kinds of power, and those who exercise the different powers tend to develop different political characters. The big question about John Kerry (and really about any senator attempting to move down the mall to the White House) is whether he is really up to the job he seeks.
Cheney's speech was a reminder that the presidential office is a place of action--which is to say, it is about the execution of its power. That execution is never more varied and dramatic, not to mention important, than when the nation is at war. "The greatest challenge of our time," said Cheney, "is preserving the freedom and security of this nation against determined enemies." It is when there is such a challenge that the country most desperately needs a president, and not just any president but one willing to use his full constitutional authority.
Cheney said, "We are in a war we did not start and have no choice but to win," a sentence that captured the
fundamental duty to act in the nation's defense that is encompassed in the executive power--and not in the legislative power. Cheney reminded the nation of the new anti-terrorism policy Bush framed in response to 9/11--that we would deal with terrorists and anyone who "supports, protects or harbors them." But, effectively choosing his verbs, he made clear that the policy was not hot air but is being carried out. "We have captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda." We have "shut down" the camps in Afghanistan where terrorists trained to kill Americans and "driven" the Taliban from power. In Iraq, to deal "with a gathering threat," we "removed" Saddam Hussein.
Capture, kill, shut down, drive from, remove: verbs of action all, the action of a kind only presidents can take.
How would John Kerry have acted? How would he act if he were president? Those were the questions Cheney wanted his national audience especially to ponder. He said that Kerry is "an experienced senator," thus damning him with faint praise, since he clearly believes that Kerry's experience as a senator has made him--not to put precisely these words in Cheney's mouth--unfit for command.
Ripping Kerry for his judgments over the years on big questions involving America's role in the world, Cheney sought to sow doubts about whether the senator would possess sufficient executive character--whether he would act as the office and circumstances demand. Thus, he quoted Kerry's line about how he wanted to lead "a more sensitive war on terror" and suggested that the senator would be a "softer" commander-in-chief. And he said that a President Kerry would wait until we were attacked before taking action and would forgo "American action"--a term not merely alliterative but politically shrewd, tying action to America and thus to the office created for such action, the presidency--unless certain other countries approved of it.
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