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The Power of VicePalin is no Cheney, and neither is Biden. How much clout will the VP's successor have?

By Barton GellmanPosted Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, at 5:50 PM ET

Dick CheneyDick Cheney made his mark by transforming the job of vice president into something very close to deputy president. Now the question is whether Sarah Palin, and to a lesser extent Joe Biden, can carry on his legacy—or whether America should want them to. The answer to both questions: probably not.

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Cheney brought to office a singular blend of knowledge, experience, discipline, zealotry, and operational talent. The last two are especially rare in combination, and mercifully so. Zealots drive history harder than opportunists do when they get their hands on the wheel. Cheney won room for maneuver from President Bush, and he knew how to use it. The interplay of their dispositions and skills (vision vs. execution, instinct vs. analysis) left even the president unaware of some of the paths that Cheney took, especially during a near-meltdown at the Justice Department in 2004. (Excerpts from my book's account of the crisis are here).

Neither Palin nor Biden will arrive on the job with all of Cheney's tools. But the position is what you make of it, and aspirants to "fourth branch" status (as one blog has taken to calling the VP's office) need not despair. The vice presidency comes with great advantages for those who seek to shape events of state. It has its own seal, like the president's, except the blue part is in the outer ring instead of the center. Cabinet officers stand when No. 2 walks in. If a military band is somewhere nearby, it is likely to strike up "Hail to Columbia" (the veep equivalent, in protocol, of "Hail to the Chief"). Everybody takes the vice president's phone call. These are not, in fact, small things. Rank projects a quiet dominance in policy debate if the vice president carries it well.

Still, there are ways Palin or Biden can ensure they retain some of Cheney's influence. The first thing they should do is keep Cheney's West Wing real estate. There's no guarantee: Every White House redraws the floor plan. Cheney disclaimed the perk of a corner office, leaving those for the chief of staff and the national security adviser. The vice president then planted himself exactly between them, bisecting the power corridor. He did much the same thing, less literally, across the executive branch. When he was chief of staff under Gerald Ford, Cheney would draw "staffing loops" to specify, for each subject of policy, which advisers got the paperwork and a seat at the table. In the last eight years, these loops had a way of skipping rivals and doubling back through the office of the vice president.

This part of the Cheney Method is adaptable by any ambitious successor: Palin or Biden need only hire wisely. Cheney's top advisers, "Scooter" Libby and David Addington, were brilliant bureaucratic operators. Cheney empowered his aides by making them "assistants to the president," the same rank held by Andrew Card and Karl Rove. He arranged for them to be bcc'd on e-mails sent around the National Security Council staff. Libby and Addington shared another Cheney quality that is surprisingly uncommon even in the White House: They knew what they wanted. Even more important, Cheney and his minions knew exactly what had to be done to get what they wanted.

Palin, by her own recent accounts, is more inclined than Biden to emulate the incumbent. In her interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC News, Palin defended the right of a commander in chief to launch pre-emptive war because "a president's job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution … the president has the obligation, the duty to defend." The invocation of oath and duty are common Cheney tropes. Other features in Palin's governing style have led some people to imagine her as "Cheney: The Sequel." A close study by the New York Times found that Palin values secrecy, "puts a premium on loyalty" and "fired officials who crossed her."

But Palin is strictly an amateur by Cheney standards. The woman tried to use free e-mail services on the Web to circumvent Alaska's public records laws, as if no one would guess the identity of . Letting her account get hacked was the inevitable newbie comeuppance. No one in Cheney's office would have dreamed of writing down some of the things the hackers found. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel who probed the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA employment, had this exchange with Scooter Libby during the grand jury on March 24, 2004: