WASHINGTON: When President George W. Bush hosted two top Democrats in the Oval Office last week to try to build a post-election truce, he seemed for a moment to forget that Vice--resident Dick Cheney was also in the room.
“All three of us recognise the importance of working together to get things done,” Bush said, referring to incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer. Apparently excluded was Cheney, seated to the side on a couch.
It was a slip-up, but one that political analysts deemed symbolic of the waning influence of a vice-president frequently caricatured in the past as a puppet master who wielded the real power in Bush's presidency.
Known as a foreign policy hawk who pushed hard for the Iraq war and programmes like the warrantless wiretapping of terrorism suspects after the Sept 11 attacks, Cheney's influence had begun to diminish well before Tuesday's election that ushered Democrats to power in both houses of Congress, analysts said.
“The vice-president was hugely influential in Bush's first term,” said Calvin Jillson, political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “His power was always bound to wane but the trajectory of that decline has accelerated after the election and it is now in free fall.”
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino dismissed such talk as coming from people “don't have insight or access to the president and the vice president”.
Another US official said speculation over the years had sometimes overstated and underestimated the breadth of Cheney's portfolio.
Cheney prides himself on a unique role that he says allows him to give unvarnished advice to Bush based on the fact that, unlike most vice-presidents, Cheney has no ambition to seek the presidency himself and has weak heart that may preclude a run.
The vice-president's associates say this allows him to stay above the fray but critics say it causes him to have a tin ear for politics that is sometimes a liability to Bush, such as when Cheney held back at first on disclosing a hunting mishap in which he accidentally shot his friend.
To pundits, even more telling than Bush's Oval Office memory lapse about Cheney was the president's decision to oust embattled Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld while calling for a “new perspective” on Iraq.
Cheney and Rumsfeld -- both prone to blunt speaking -- are two of the most controversial figures in the Bush administration.
So rock solid is their alliance -- which dates back a generation to the Ford administration -- that Cheney resisted a push last year for Rumsfeld's dismissal supported by former White House chief of staff Andy Card and first lady Laura Bush, according to “State of Denial,” a book by Bob Woodward.
While Cheney may have helped to head off an earlier exit by Rumsfeld, his leverage during Bush's second term is not what it was when the president, initially inexperienced at foreign policy, took office in 2001, analysts said.
The move of close Bush friend Condoleezza Rice to the job of Secretary of State in 2005 and the naming earlier this year of Joshua Bolten to succeed Card as chief of staff created some counterweights to Cheney's influence, said Stephen Wayne, professor of government at Georgetown University.
But the reshaping of the political landscape with the Democratic congressional victories could have further ramifications for Cheney as Bush emphasizes bipartisanship and greater flexibility on Iraq.
In comments that seemed to be at odds with Bush's acknowledgment of voter discontent with Iraq policy, Cheney insisted to ABC News that it would be “full speed ahead” there regardless of the election outcome.—Reuters
