After the Inauguration Marilyn and I took several days down at Hougomont. Now that I was officially the Vice President we couldn’t take our G-IV down, we had to fly in a government plane. What kind of government plane, you ask? We took Air Force Two, an almost brand new Boeing 757. This is a plane that normally can carry about 200 passengers and was now decked out in sybaritic luxury for less than 50. I told Marilyn that we’d need to upgrade when I left the government. Air Force Two is actually just a designation that the Veep is on board. It could be anything from a puddle jumper up to the Presidential 747, if he isn’t on board. If the runway in Nassau wasn’t long enough they would have sent us in a government C-20, another G-IV.
Waiting for us at the airport was a delegation from the embassy and another from Government House. We were invited to several events, including a formal dinner with the Prime Minister. Meanwhile the press was there to take photos of the billionaire politician who had bought a Vice Presidency (in the words of the New York Times, if they only knew how true that was!) and was now beginning a four year vacation paid for by American taxpayers (Fox News). Some days you just can’t win! I needed to get a handle on this quickly, and let everybody know that my future vacations were not state functions!
Another surprise was awaiting us when we got to Hougomont. Aside from how the Secret Service had taken over the security building on the grounds, now we had a Coast Guard cutter sailing around a mile or two off the beach! I could almost feel the eyes scanning us from binoculars. It was probably a good thing they were around, though, since if I looked down the beach in either direction I could see photographers at the edge of our property line. I was really at the center of a media frenzy now, and Marilyn and I needed to get used to it.
This Vice President thing was going to take some getting used to.
Chapter 136: Waiting
February to September, 2001
George Bush had a serious agenda to remodel the country and the government, and it became very obvious at an early stage. He planned to make some wholesale changes in the way things were done.
Well, that is probably an overstatement. What was much more accurate was that George’s backers had very serious plans, and George was along for the ride. To what extent he knew that he was overmatched was questionable. From what I could see working with the man, he was quite possibly the dumbest President we had suffered under since Warren Harding! I might even have to go back to some of the idiots who were in charge of the country before the Civil War to find a match. Certainly he had no native talent for management.
It was much more accurate to say that he paid the greatest heed to the last fellow who talked to him. It became a gigantic wrestling match to become that person. His instincts were conservative, and that was fine, but he let his deputies and department heads craft his agenda, not the other way around. They would make plans and then talk him into them. Cheney and Rove were the leaders of this group, and it was all the moderates could do to try and hold their own.
Taxes? They needed to be lowered, drastically! He envisioned tax cuts for all eight years of his Presidency, or at least the Wall Street types envisioned them for him. We had a bunch of them around. And loopholes! We needed more loopholes!
The military? That needed to be strengthened, really grown! So said the defense contractors who wanted to sell their latest goodies, and the Pentagon generals and admirals who wanted to buy them.
Medicare? For a guy who had pushed against entitlements, he was very much in favor of increasing benefits that mostly benefited the insurance companies and the drug companies.
Compassionate conservatism? Nobody really understood it, but it seemed that it involved bringing in the hard right fundamentalist branch of the Christian churches. They set up a faith-based initiatives group in the West Wing to do something to liaison with church-run charities, and Ashcroft began loading up the Justice Department with lawyers who graduated from Liberty University and other Bible colleges.
Foreign policy? Cheney and Wolfowitz and a shitload of chickenhawks were champing at the bit to start a new war in the Middle East. They believed that the first President Bush had screwed up by not conquering Iraq when he had the chance. Now they envisioned doing it right, in a new war, one which would bring freedom and democracy to the country, and from there spread to the surrounding nations. It would be quick and easy and profitable to boot! In this they were happily aided by George himself, who considered his father’s quite reasoned ending of the Gulf War as a defeat. George would solve the problem his father had let fester.
The Cabinet was not a happy place. It wasn’t quite open war, but it came close. On the right you had an axis based on Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft, all of them full of grand plans to reform America and the world. We were a Christian nation with Christian values and we should be damn well giving those values to the rest of the planet, whether the rest of the planet wanted them or not! Wall Street was to be allowed the proper level of freedom to bring the benefits of American style capitalism first to Main Street, and then to the rest of the world. On the other side of the equation were the moderates, those with ties to the liberal or moderate wing of the party. The main axis on this side was O’Neill, Powell, and myself, and I wondered how long that would last.
The mood of the Republican Party was still swinging rightward, and moderates were the new liberals, something to be branded as un-American. As Whip I had been able to keep many of the Congressional idiots muzzled and out of power, but that was changing. Since the Republicans retained control of the House in the last elections, some of the crazies had more seniority and had moved up in their committees and subcommittees. With longevity grew power, and John Boehner was not being as successful at keeping them from getting out of hand. In Congress the bottom line was that if the President wanted to do something crazy, he had a ready audience and an eager band of helpers.
Dick Cheney seemed to spend almost as much time at the White House as he did at Foggy Bottom, the neighborhood that was home to the State Department. In this he was aided by his right hand man, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who he had gotten confirmed as his Deputy Secretary of State. Scooter was Dick’s chief henchman, and his job was to run the rest of the world while Dick ran George Bush. I had my own network of staffers and assistants to help me in this. I had brought Frank Stouffer and Carter Braxton in as part of my team, as Chief of Staff and Communications Director, with Mindy McIlroy Geisinger as my Personal Assistant, and had commandeered Matt Scully as well. Meanwhile, Marty Adrianopolis was now over at the American Renaissance Initiative, and he had funneled some staffers from there to me. These were all people with ties to the moderate side and to me, and not so much to George or Dick or Karl.
The one thing Dick couldn’t do was to bar me from meeting with the President. If Cheney met with Bush, I would manage to meet with him next. I might not be able to get George to see reason on things (he really was stupid, with a very simplistic view of the world) but sometimes I could tone down his actions or delay them. For instance, almost immediately after taking office George Bush began talking about a 10 % cut in all taxes across the board, and this was just to be the start of a multi-year effort to drastically cut taxes. Almost immediately this was told to Grover Norquist, who began promoting it heavily in Congress. Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and I were aghast at what this would do to revenues and the deficit! The best we could come up with was a reduction in the first year to a 5 % cut.