Question for the Room.

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When Bush flew out of D.C., his final approval numbers sat at an anemic 22 percent. But Cheney’s were even lower, at an almost unimaginable 13 percent.

Obviously, Cheney had a large hand in shaping Bush administration policy on everything from wiretapping to torture — probably a more direct hand than Bush — but I’m still not quite sure why his numbers would be so much lower than Bush’s, who is still the public face of those policies.

Can somebody school me? Are lower poll numbers for a VP the historical trend?

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.

Latest posts by G.D. (see all)

  • Julian

    I don’t know about historical trend, but this doesn’t surprise me too much. Bush is a likeable enough fellow (you know what I mean) while Cheney really seems to have no redeeming qualities. The joke of political cartoons — and Richard Dreyfuss’s awesome portrayal in W. — has been that Cheney is the puppet master, so it’s plausible to me that (stupid) people could ascribe the worst parts of the administration’s policy solely to Cheney and let Bush off as just a dumb nice guy.

  • quadmoniker

    I agree with Julian. Accounts of the Bush administration just show him as incompetent, which is bad, but not evil and manipulative like Cheney, which is worse. And the Post series on Cheney followed up with “Angler” don’t help. Neither did his turn as a Mr. Potter look alike at the inauguration.

  • mealworm

    Cheney on several occasions took the time to clearly articulate his evil, removing the benefit of the doubt that he might be just an idiot, which Bush “enjoys”.

  • geo

    along with the reasons made by the previous responses, cheney redefined the role of vp. this adds to why he has such low approval numbers.