Cheney, On His “So?” Comment

Martha Raddatz scores yet another sit-down with the veep:

Q But you understand that some people, that they thought, aha, that Dick Cheney, he doesn’t care about –

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Look, there are a lot of people out there who don’t agree with me, Martha, about a lot of things. But I’m — if I wanted to be loved, I ought to be a TV correspondent, not a politician. (Laughter.)

Q Believe me, we’re not always loved either. (Laughter.)

Also, this earlier snippet:

Q Well, you’ve been pretty accessible on this trip, I’ll say, I’ll say that. Normally you aren’t — we don’t hear from you very often. I think I said to you that I’d covered the White House two-and-a-half years and I’ve never really met you before. Is that really fair to the public? Because you’ve been so powerful, shouldn’t you be out there answering questions more?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Martha, the way I look at it, and the reason I am less visible in this job than, say, I was when I was Secretary of Defense — there I was out all the time — this is a different job. My job really here is as an advisor to the President, as a counselor, in effect. I don’t run anything. I’m not in charge of a department or a particular policy area. And for me to be out all the time commenting on the issues of the day, pontificating, if you will, about what’s going on, to some extent infringes upon everybody else in the administration, especially those people who have got specific responsibilities.

So I do it rarely. I’ve agreed to do this today because we’ve done this trip. That involves a certain amount of visibility, and so forth, and so I’ve done that. But it’s a very conscious decision my part that the job I’ve had as Vice President can best be done if I’m not out publicly commenting on all of these issues. The question you and your colleagues in the press always ask is, well, what did you advise the President; did you support that policy; did he do what you recommended? Those are questions I won’t answer. My value to him is the fact that we can talk privately, I can tell him what I think. Sometimes he agrees, sometimes he disagrees. He doesn’t always take my advice, by any means. But the contribution I make, and my value to him I think is greater because he knows and everybody else knows I’m not going to be in the front pages of the paper tomorrow talking about what I advised the President on a particular issue.

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