Vice President Dick Cheney did not make it to a $500-a-plate fundraising luncheon in Homer Glen, Ill., today because of an abnormal heartbeat.
Instead he visited George Washington University Hospital so doctors could "restore his normal rhythm" for the second time this year.
"An electrical impulse was delivered to restore the heart to normal rhythm," said spokeswoman Megan Mitchell. "The procedure went smoothly and without complication."
Now, Mitchell added, Cheney is home and resuming his normal schedule.
Earlier in the day, she described what happened to spark the incident this way:
During a visit with his doctors this morning, it was discovered that the vice president is experiencing a recurrence of atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart. Later this afternoon, the vice president will visit George Washington University Hospital for an outpatient procedure to restore his normal rhythm.
Cheney, 67, had his first heart attack when he was 37 years old. The former Wyoming congressman, White House chief of staff and Pentagon secretary has had three attacks since, along with quadruple bypass surgery, two artery-clearing angioplasties and the implantation of a pacemaker.
Ozinga is in a tight race with Democrat Debbie Halverson, an Illinois state senator whose campaign had pounced on Cheney's planned visit as an example of Ozinga being out of touch with the district's residents.
President Bush, after a meeting with business leaders in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Cheney attended the morning briefings and was confident of success.
"The vice president’s going to be fine. I talked to him this morning,” Bush said. "He was confident, the doctors are confident, therefore I’m confident.”
Vice President Dick Cheney loves to say that when he represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives in the 1980s, the delegation was small, "but it was quality."
The state's population is so low that it has but one congressional district.
And the representative of that at-large district since 1995, Barbara L. Cubin, a Republican of course, is not running for reelection. She squeaked by two years ago with a roughly 1,000-vote margin over Democrat Gary Trauner.
Certainly, Wyoming has historically been considered a bright red state.
Not this year, at least in the race for Cheney's seat. And the trend may be emblematic of the difficulties his Republicans are facing in the Mountain West.
Trauner is running again, and the race against Republican Cynthia Lummis could be up for grabs.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo credit: Marilyn Newton / Gazette-Journal via Associated Press
It isn't that director Oliver Stone is trying to influence the Nov. 4 election. Really. It's just that his biopic on George W. Bush is due to be released Oct. 17, about three weeks before voters head to the polls.
In an interview last week with the Times of London, Stone said in advance of the release that his new movie portrays President Bush as, well, a character.
It's a comedy only in the sense of tragic comedy. You laugh in your mind because Bush is a goof-ball, because he's awkward, but at the same time he has a stubbornness, a John Wayne ethos, an anger, an impatience, that make him fascinating. You may hate Wayne's politics, but you may well enjoy his company on screen.
The movie, starring Josh Brolin as George W. Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, is "a human portrait of a man, not meant to insult people who believe in what Bush believes in," said Stone, whose earlier works on "JFK" and "Nixon" stirred controversy. Brolin, he said, portrays Bush as "charming, which I think he is." Stone also compared Bush to his father, George H.W. Bush:
I think he (W.) is a wonderful salesman, charismatic to many people and he has a politician's ability to touch and reach, which his father never had. So he did outdo his father -- as a salesman.
Stone told The Times he's not sure the public will rush to the theaters to see a movie about an unpopular president, even though he tried to walk in the president's shoes. He explained:
It's my job ... if I'm dramatizing his life ... to step above my hate.
But enough of words. Here's the latest trailer leaking out of his studios.
Maybe what happens in Nevada should stay in Nevada.
The president was stuck in Washington, making last-minute calls in the effort to win congressional approval for a $700-billion financial rescue plan. So Vice President Dick Cheney was tapped to go to Reno in his place and address the White House Conference on North American Wildlife Policy.
President Bush created the conference in 2007 via executive order, and charged it with drafting a plan to guide future wildlife conservation efforts to protect "the nation's hunting heritage."
Bush, introducing Cheney via video, explained why he was still in Washington and added, "In my place I have sent my favorite hunter."
Cheney, alluding to the 2006 accident in which he accidentally shot his hunting partner and lawyer friend Harry Whittington in the face with pellets, told the crowd he'd taken a lot of grief over the incident over the years, "most of it from the president. The president says to me, 'Here I am at 30% in the polls and you shot the only trial lawyer in Texas who supports me.' "
Then Cheney launched into his rendition of why Bush will be remembered as a great conservationist. The vice president said the White House is even now expanding its efforts in conservation.
Over the next five years, even after Bush has left the White House, Cheney said the administration will have put into place tax incentives that could add 7 million acres to the Conservation Reserve and restore 4 million acres of wetlands.
President Bush Is heading out of town today for a Texas weekend -- and Republican fund-raising three days out of four.
He postponed his travel by one day. Originally, he planned to leave Washington on Thursday, and speak at a wildlife conference today in Nevada. Instead, he dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to the conference and stayed at the White House dialing for dollars (a bloggy way of saying that he was working the telephone on behalf of the financial rescue legislation up for a vote today in the House of Representatives.)
But the fund-raising can be put off only so long; ditto a couple of days in his home in Crawford.
So, if he holds to his schedule, he'll be campaigning behind closed doors at a private home in St. Louis this evening for Kenny Hulshof, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Missouri.
On Saturday, in Bush's hometown of Midland, Tex., and on Monday, in San Antonio, the beneficiary is the Congressional Trust 2008, a joint fund-raising operation of the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.
As for work, on the way home on Monday, the president is planning to stop in Cincinnati to speak about the nation's judiciary -- yet one more opportunity for the president to put a spotlight on his judicial philosophy and the stakes in electing a president likely to fill multiple potential vacancies on the Supreme Court.
Back at the White House, he will greet members of the U.S. Summer Olympic and Paralympic teams on Tuesday.
For the president's public schedule, click on Read Full Story...
It seems like CBS has strung out Katie Couric's interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin longer than just about any in presidential history, or television history for that matter.
Tonight's installment, aired before the debate, featured Couric asking both Palin and Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden to name the best and worst things that the incumbent vice president, Dick Cheney, has done over the last eight years.
Biden was substantive. Citing Cheney's approval of torture and his fierce defense of the president's prerogative to make unilateral decisions without consulting Congress, Biden said Cheney had "done more harm than any other single elected official in my memory in terms of shredding the Constitution." As for praise, Biden cited Cheney's strength under duress, saying, "I admire his willingness to take positions that are completely contrary to popular opinion."
Palin was not as policy-oriented. Citing as Cheney's worst moment the "duck-hunting accident" in which he accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington, Palin, who hunts animals with rifles from airplanes, explained that the accident "was made into a caricature of him, and that was kind of unfortunate."
As for his best achievement, Palin, whose oldest son has just deployed to Iraq, said Cheney has "shown his support along with George W. Bush of our troops."
With all eyes, or anyway the political ones, trained on tonight's vice presidential debate between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, we got to wondering how the current vice president fared in his.
So we took a look at Dick Cheney's debates -- in 2000 against then-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (now a connected-at-the-hip buddy of Republican John McCain), and in 2004 against that fresh face on the national scene, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. 'Nuff said.
Turns out that Cheney, since dubbed Darth Vader for his dark vision and passion for secrecy, forecast a lot of the Bush administration's key initiatives.
In 2000, asked by moderator Bernard Shaw of CNN about whether a Bush-Cheney White House would move against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Cheney basically said yes. Check it out.
And in 2004, asked by moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS, about the Iraq war, Cheney basically used his "spin" option to counter Edwards' claim that the United States, having alienated traditional allies, was having to shoulder the burden alone. Here's the clip.
This year, said spokeswoman Megan Mitchell, Cheney "looks forward to watching the debate" from the vice presidential home at the Naval Observatory. Maybe even with his feet up.
And has his dedication to enhancing the power of the executive branch under President Bush resulted, at the end of their tenure, in a weakened presidency?
A quarter-century before he became vice president, Cheney was already an astute, close-in observer of executive power.
As Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff, he ran a hands-on operation from the office at the southwest corner of the White House West Wing just a few steps from the Oval Office.
It was during the immediate post-Watergate years of Ford's presidency, when the pendulum of political power had swung back to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Cheney drew from that experience the philosophy of far-reaching executive power that he took with him when he moved into the vice president's office (next door to his original office) in 2001.
Spencer Ackerman, writing on the website of the TPMCafe Book Club, argues that the vice president is so dedicated to enhancing executive power that "he either didn't notice or didn't appreciate the steady resurgence of executive authority during the Reagan-through-Clinton years."
It's an interesting observation about Cheney, a onetime professor of political science and a lifetime student of poli sci.
By overreaching, Ackerman maintains, Cheney is leaving office "having discredited, through example, the idea of unfettered executive supremacy."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Dick Cheney with Gerald R. Ford in 1975. Credit: Associated Press
The president's effort to win congressional approval of a $700-billion plan to rescue the economy is definitely keeping him in town -- and, at least for now, away from Republican fund-raisers.
Bush was planning to head west on Thursday for a long weekend. Among his first stops -- and now postponed -- was a fund-raiser in Midland, Texas, for Rep. Mike Conaway, the Midland Reporter-Telegram reported today. Midland, shining in the picture above, is, of course, where Bush was raised.
On Friday, he was planning to speak at a wildlife conference in Reno. He is dispatching Cheney, whose kinship with wildlife has been well documented on the bird hunting grounds of Texas.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said of the evolving schedule:
The president intends to stay here to work on this financial rescue package with members of Congress for as long as it takes to get this done, because it is critical. And if we need to change our plans for Friday, we'll do that.
One of the shockers in Monday's pretty shocking rebuff of the Republican president by the Republican caucus is that Vice President Dick Cheney, who once had a deft touch at twisting arms on the Hill, apparently did not do well.
In San Diego County, for instance, four out of five members of the congressional delegation voted no. And several of them were personally lobbied by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Duncan Hunter, a 28-year veteran Republican who is retiring at the end of this session, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Cheney personally appealed for his support. Hunter told the vice president that the $700-billion bailout amounted to a "massive exposure for the American taxpayer for what's at best a very limited return."
Cheney, according to Hunter, "said he appreciated my rationale and that he disagreed with it."
What a contrast from six years ago when, according to the new book on Cheney by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Cheney frightened Republican Leader Dick Armey of Texas into supporting the war in Iraq that he initially opposed. In "Angler" (pages 221-222), Armey reports that he felt rolled after a private briefing from Cheney about the potential threat that Iraq posed.
Did Dick Cheney, a fellow who had been my trusted friend, did he purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue? I will go so far as to say I seriously feel that may be the case. ... Had I known or believed then what I believe I know now, I would have publicly opposed this resolution right to the bitter end and I believe I might have stopped it from happening, and I believe I'd have done a better service to my country had I done so.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
