Will the Republicans dump Dick? Or will they keep the Vice-President on the ticket? Given Dick Cheney's record of late and his low public-approval ratings -- the Veep is a Creep being the prevailing sentiment -- it seems reasonable that he would be dropped in favour of a Colin Powell or a Rudy Giuliani. But it is late in the game and the Democrats look to be getting their preferred fall matchup: Kerry-Edwards versus Bush-Albatross.
Mr. Cheney is cornered by controversy. One imbroglio involves allegations of lurid war profiteering in Iraq on the part of his former company, Halliburton, from which he retired with a $34-million sendoff. In another, a judge in Europe has warned that the Vice-President could be charged over allegations that, when he was in charge, Halliburton paid bribes for a contract to build a liquefied natural-gas plant in Nigeria. And in another ongoing investigation, he is suspected of being a major player in the White House's outing of a CIA officer, an operation designed to silence one of the administration's critics.
On the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, it is Dick Cheney who is targeted as the chief culprit; he even claimed that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear program. His insistence that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda has been torn to shreds by investigating bodies.
Mr. Cheney has all this going for him -- and more. Recently, while on the Senate floor, he sent a message of civility across his great land. He told Senator Patrick Leahy, who was nosing in on the Halliburton file, to go "f---" himself. It's pretty much the same message he's had for anyone who isn't in Rush Limbaugh land.
Mr. Cheney, it can be recalled, was appointed in 1999 to help George W. Bush find a candidate for vice-president. He ended up taking the job himself and heading up the axis of excess in the Bush administration. The Tony Blair government sees him as the "visceral unilateralist" who undercut any attempts by London to get more United Nations support for the Iraqi invasion.
The appearance of the winsome John Edwards on the Democratic ticket served to highlight the GOP's Cheney problem and led to calls to give him the hook.
It's not just that the Vice-President is unpopular. There is the added danger that between now and November, as the dissenters point out, he could get nailed on any one of the controversies he faces, thereby causing the party's prospects to plunge further.
But there's the other Republican camp, the "Let's stick with Dick" faction. It argues that it would look too much like an act of desperation to dump him at this point. It would come as an admission that the Republicans were losing.
Ergo, this reasoning goes, let's keep Mr. Cheney and lose anyway.
The act-of-desperation noises probably would die out within a week or so. Mr. Bush could then appear at his nominating convention with a new running mate who could broaden the party's appeal to the moderates, who could well decide the election.
But Mr. Bush doesn't like to fire anyone. He is likely to repeat the mistake his father made in the 1992 campaign when he was urged to dump Dan Quayle as running mate, but, instead, stuck with the guy who couldn't spell potato and thought -- or so it was said of him -- that they spoke Latin in Latin America.
That Mr. Bush is capable of long stretches of denial became glaringly apparent this week as he repeated his mantra that his war in Iraq -- which has given birth to new hatreds and new terrorists -- has made the world a safer place.
It was only last month that the State Department tried a similar line, putting out a press release saying acts of terror were down. Then, confronted with the real statistics -- that they were rising -- State shamefacedly had to correct its own lie.
But that was then. This is now. And George W. Bush, egregiously, is sticking with the original wrong report. Just as -- for the decidedly wrong choice for the Republican ticket -- he'll stick with Dick.