December 22, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/opinion/22kristol.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Popularity Isn’t Everything
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
You gotta love Dick Cheney.
O.K., O.K. ... you don’t have to. But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:
WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?
CHENEY: I did.
WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?
CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.
No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (“I thought he merited it.”) Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man. And a thoughtful one, because he knows that justice is sometimes too harsh, and should be tempered by civility.
Now Cheney isn’t, I’m afraid, always wise. For example, he’s still a defender of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He even told Wallace he disagreed with the decision to fire Rumsfeld: “I was a Rumsfeld man ... I thought he did a good job for us.”
I couldn’t disagree more. But Cheney’s loyalty to Rumsfeld didn’t stop Cheney from being a key behind-the-scenes player in encouraging George Bush to order the surge of troops to Iraq at the end of 2006 — after Rumsfeld had resisted adding troops for years. I’m told by several key advocates of the surge that Cheney was crucial in helping the president come to what was a difficult and unpopular decision — one opposed at the time by the huge majority of foreign policy experts, pundits and pontificators. Most of them — and the man most of them are happy won the election, Barack Obama — now acknowledge the surge’s success. But don’t expect them to give much credit to Cheney.
But enough in defense of the nation’s most unpopular Republican. Let me turn to the nation’s most unpopular Democrat, Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois.
After all, how many of today’s politicians can claim to be a living embodiment of a great American tradition — in this case, the corrupt machine politicians? Their credo was laid down about a century ago by Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkitt: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”
Blagojevich is even more terse: “I want to make money.” And when an opportunity came along — a vacant Senate seat — he didn’t sit around studying polls and consulting focus groups. He got to work. He knows — as Americans have always known — that the good things in life aren’t free. As he put it eloquently in discussing the vacant Senate seat, “I’ve got this thing, and it’s [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing.”
It’s also nice, in this day and age, to see an example of family togetherness and marital harmony. Rod and his wife, Patti, seem to be in accord on so many things. For example, in a disinclination to turn the other cheek. During a Nov. 3 telephone conversation between Blagojevich and an aide about a hostile Chicago Tribune editorial, Patti was heard in the background urging a receptive Rod to punish the corporation that owns The Tribune and the Chicago Cubs: “Hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive] ... [expletive] them.”
But I was only truly won over to Blagojevich on Friday, when he pledged: “I will fight this thing every step of the way. I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath.” He then quoted the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating ...
But Blagojevich carefully cut off his recitation before the stanza’s last line: “And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.”
Blagojevich must have known he’d violated this maxim. He’d tried to look too good, coiffing his hair with a special brush he keeps with him at all times. (According to The Washington Post, he “goes ballistic when he can’t put his hands on it.”) More important, he’d talked too wise — especially when being bugged by the F.B.I. But you’ve got to give Blagojevich credit for a kind of self-knowledge in omitting from his statement the damning last line of the stanza.
I’ve never heard Dick Cheney quote Kipling. But I suspect he might like Kipling, and that Kipling would admire him — a man who has never gone out of his way to look too good, nor talk too wise, but who has always, in four decades of public service, sought “to fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”
