“Would a Rudy Giuliani administration be populated with a cabinet of Republican rivals and a powerful, all-knowing vice president like Dick Cheney?” AP’s Beverley Wang guesses it might after hearing Giuliani’s answers to questions at a New Hampshire town hall meeting.
Giuliani pivoted from a question about potential picks for secretary of state to this: “Let me answer with the question of what you would look for in a vice president first — again without any presumption that I’m going to be the nominee.”
In an answer that mentioned Cheney more than once, Giuliani said, “A vice president has to be a partner in the administration. The vice president has to know everything that’s going on, just in case the vice president has to step in at a moment’s notice,” he said. He added that during a conversation with Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001, he felt the vice president “had a sense that he knew what he was doing.”
Following his train of thought to cabinet picks, Giuliani left the door open in his administration for rivals like McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and others currently battling him for the Republican nomination.
While I agree with Steve Benen that “you don’t need yet another reason to reject the very idea of a Rudy Giuliani presidential administration,” it’s far from clear that this is one of them.
One can simultaneously believe that Dick Cheney was given too much power, that this administration overstepped its bounds, or even that this has been the worst presidency in the history of the known universe and still agree that “A vice president has to be a partner in the administration. The vice president has to know everything that’s going on, just in case the vice president has to step in at a moment’s notice.” Indeed, one would think that’s the very definition of a modern VP’s job.
Photo via Harry’s Place via Google.
