Below The Beltway

Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating article about the extent to which the Bush Administration has become irrelevant to already active 2008 Presidential election:

This is the first White House in 80 years without someone running for president, a twist of history that will shape not just the campaign but also the remainder of the Bush administration. With neither a president seeking reelection nor a vice president positioned as the heir presumptive, the Bush team will increasingly turn into a spectator in the nation’s political debate.

Its absence in the contest will spare the White House the trials of a campaign, easing the tensions between governing priorities and election imperatives that traditionally tear at the institution. Yet, at the same time, it means that no one will be making the case for the Bush legacy as 2008 nears. To one degree or another, all of the candidates, including the Republicans, will distance themselves from the president, particularly if he remains as unpopular as he is today.

“It creates a fundamentally different situation than we’ve known in the past,” said Craig Fuller, chief of staff to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush as he prepared for his 1988 presidential run. “What’s so starkly different about this situation is that not only is the president, by virtue of the calendar, a lame duck, but there’s no champion out there on the field for him.”

In fact, even the front-runners for the Republican nomination are finding ways, sometimes subtle, to distinguish themselves from the Bush Administration, but the uniqueness of the 2008 election in modern American political history can’t be understated:

The situation for Bush defies modern tradition. The last time neither president nor vice president actively ran was in 1928, when Calvin Coolidge did not seek reelection and hated Vice President Charles G. Dawes so much that he made it clear that fellow Republicans should not consider him. Even so, Coolidge had a stake in the election, with his commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, carrying the banner. The only election since then without a president or vice president on a major-party ballot was in 1952, when Vice President Alben W. Barkley, at 74 and with no support from Harry S. Truman, lost the Democratic nomination to Adlai Stevenson.

This is one of the reasons that many pundits thought Cheney would step down in 2004 in favor of a nominee who could be Bush’s heir apparent. Quite honestly, though, I’ve been confused about George W. Bush’s ideas concerning his successor ever since the day he selected Cheney as his Vice-Presidential nominee.

Even then, it was obvious that Cheney never intended to be a candidate for President in his own right. Quite honestly, at the time I thought the selection was something of a cop-out given that Cheney had been the head of Bush’s Vice-Presidential selection committee. The fact that George W. Bush didn’t pick a Vice-President in 2000 who could be his obvious and natural successor, combined with the fact that he didn’t change that selection in 2004, makes me wonder if he actually cares who succeeds him as the presumptive head of the Republican Party.