By David Nather, CQ Staff

One can never be sure what the most important issues will be over the next four to eight years. That’s a weakness of presidential elections. Every four years, the nation’s most prominent journalists take their best guesses and ask the presidential candidates — and the vice presidential candidates — the questions they think will matter the most over the long term.

When George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, the national media found tough-sounding questions to fire at the man who would become the next vice president: Why was his voting record in Congress so conservative? Why did he oppose sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s? Why did he vote against reauthorizing the Older Americans Act?

Was he healthy enough to be vice president, given his history of three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery? And what did he plan to do with all those stock options he had from Halliburton, the energy company he ran at the time?

As pointed as the questions were, they missed the issues and stories that would really matter over the next eight years. Here are a few topics that never seemed to make the cut: Cheney’s views of executive power, his attitude toward openness in government and his views of what kinds of tactics are necessary to prevent terrorism.

Any questions about those topics — or, at least, more attention to clues that were readily available in his past — would have provided a better preview of the actual events of Cheney’s vice presidency. So would have a basic question about the working relationship between Bush and Cheney: Just how much power did Bush intend to give him if they were elected?

Now that the answer to the last question is clear, the power of the vice presidency is likely to be subjected to a level of scrutiny in 2008 than it has rarely, if ever, been given in past presidential elections.

Cheney’s impact on the Bush presidency — his role in the buildup to the Iraq War, his influence on anti-terrorism policies such as eavesdropping and interrogation tactics, and his expansive view of executive power — has been so widespread that his status as the most powerful vice president in history isn’t seriously debated anymore.

But these are also some of the most controversial aspects of Bush’s tenure, and the fact that Cheney’s fingerprints are on so many of them sets the stage for a fresh look at the proper role of a traditionally overlooked office that has been quietly growing in power and influence for more than 30 years.

Because of Cheney, the next vice presidential candidates will have to answer more questions about their views, not just about their health and whether they could function as president if needed. And the next presidential nominees will be under more pressure to spell out what responsibilities their vice presidents would have — and where those responsibilities would end.

“The vice president’s importance will probably be raised in the campaign in a way that it hasn’t been raised in many, many years because of the Cheney phenomenon,” said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

POWER CENTER: Cheney took office as perhaps the most experienced vice president ever and has become the most powerful. Critics say he would have been more accountable to the public, and perhaps less secretive, if he had wanted to run for president himself when Bush's term was over. (GETTY IMAGES / CHIP SOMODEVILLA)

Craig L. Fuller, who served as chief of staff to Bush’s father when the elder Bush was vice president in the 1980s, said “regardless of how people feel about Vice President Cheney, the role of the vice president, and the selection of the vice president, is going to receive a lot more attention next year. It’s going to be unavoidable. And I think that’s a good thing.”

“It’s hard to imagine going through the debates without having some questions about the role of the vice president,” said Fuller, now an executive vice president at APCO Worldwide, an international lobbying and consulting firm.

Fuller is no critic of Cheney’s performance. He’s just acknowledging the reality of Cheney’s record and its impact on his office and Bush’s. Cheney’s staff declined to discuss the effect his tenure is likely to have on the 2008 race, but it’s already clear that his record has been divisive enough that many voters probably won’t view it as a model for the next vice presidency.

Cheney’s approval ratings are in the 30 percent range in most polls, about the same as Bush’s. Prominent former administration officials have turned on him. Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff, once called Cheney part of a “cabal” with then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and still sees him as someone who “goes off and does things on his own.”

And last week’s sentencing of Cheney’s ex-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to two and a half years in prison for lying about his conversations with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame was a reminder of the power Cheney’s allies could wield to discredit critics of the Iraq War. Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was one of the most outspoken critics of the intelligence that led to the war.

That doesn’t mean Cheney’s successor is likely to return to the bit-player status vice presidents used to have — breaking ties in the Senate, going to funerals, being the president’s political attack dog and waiting to see if the president dies.

Ever since Jimmy Carter gave Walter F. Mondale an office in the West Wing and the authority to go with it in 1977, vice presidents have come to expect a level of influence that would have been unthinkable in earlier decades. They participate in all national security briefings; they have access to the same intelligence reports the president receives; they get weekly lunches with the president; and their staffs have standing invitations to virtually all White House policy meetings.

Most experts on the vice presidency expect Cheney’s successor to insist on a continuation of those practices and, to some extent, the integration of the presidential and vice presidential staffs that Cheney has enjoyed under Bush. Cheney’s chief of staff, for example, also carries the title of assistant to the president.

But Mondale, whose term is generally considered the starting point of the modern vice presidency, is convinced that the next president and vice president need to come to an informal agreement on the limits of what the vice president can actually do in the president’s name — and that the public needs to hold them to it in the next election.

Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee who later served as ambassador to Japan and is now a senior counsel at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, is disturbed by the way he has seen Cheney use his power: the visits to intelligence agencies in search of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the “spooky and often wrong” statements about the case for war, the involvement of his staff in efforts to discredit critics of the war.

“I’m sure Carter would have kicked me out of the White House if I did that,” Mondale said in an interview.

Running His Own Show

The challenge, for Congress and the public, will be to decide whether a corrective mechanism is needed when a vice president exerts so much influence in an administration and uses it to such disputed ends.

There aren’t a lot of duties that are formally spelled out for vice presidents — other than the constitutional responsibility to preside over the Senate and the 1949 law that gives them membership on the National Security Council. And even though vice presidents are elected along with the president, the elections aren’t really about them, as many presidential scholars point out.

So their power depends almost entirely on how much a president is willing to hand over. “It’s what the president wants,” said former Vice President Dan Quayle, who served with Bush’s father. “You’re there; you’re No. 2, and you know you’re No. 2; and you know you’re there to advance the president’s agenda.”

Quayle, now chairman of Cerberus Global Investments, LLC, doesn’t think that dynamic has changed even under Cheney. But even those who see Cheney’s tenure as a redefining moment for the vice presidency don’t think there is a lot that anyone, other than the president, can do to alter the balance of power.

If the president wants to make the vice president his chief foreign policy adviser and allow him to question intelligence agencies on their work, there is little Congress can do to stop that from happening. It can’t place limits on the work the vice president does, lawmakers say, as long as nothing illegal is going on.

“I don’t think Congress has any say in that,” said Democratic Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is a frequent Cheney adversary. “I think that’s purely a matter of how the president decides to allocate responsibilities among the people who work for him.”

Some of Cheney’s power simply came from his many years of government experience — including his service when he was still in his 30s as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff — and his ability to know what channels to use when he needed information, according to Stephen J. Yates, Cheney’s deputy national security adviser from 2001 through 2005.

“I could be fumbling around for a year before I realized that, ‘Hey, [Cheney] is a really good source of information that I could have if I just asked for it,’ ” said Yates, now a senior fellow in Asia Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, a conservative think tank. “He’s been around the block. He knew what kind of information to get and where to get it.”

And there is little sign that Bush is unhappy with the multiple roles Cheney has taken on. “There seems to be less disagreement between him and the president than between most presidents and vice presidents in history,” said Timothy Walch, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and editor of “At the President’s Side,” one of the few recent volumes about the vice presidency.

Yet the combination of Cheney’s controversial policies, his reflexive secrecy and his dismissive attitude toward public opinion has made his office a deeply controversial power center — and an insulated one. Just before the November election, for example, Cheney conceded in a television interview that the Iraq War “may not be popular with the public.” But, he said, “it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right.”

Cheney might care more about what the public thinks, some say, if he had not pledged from the beginning not to run for president himself, a decision that removed the need for him to campaign and be exposed to feedback from the voters.

“We don’t have the customary oversight mechanisms for someone who is exercising real power but is barely making cameo appearances before the public,” said Fein.

At the time, Bush’s selection of Cheney was widely praised. Because Cheney wasn’t seeking the presidency, he was seen as someone who could be completely loyal to the president and, in turn, win more power because Bush trusted him not to have a competing agenda.

WAR LEADERS: Cheney and Rumsfeld, left, were the key figures in helping Bush shape his Iraq policy (WHITE HOUSE / GETTY IMAGES / ERIC DRAPER)

In hindsight, many analysts say Bush’s choice of a vice president who didn’t have to stay in touch with the voters might not be considered such a good move.

“I think that will really be reassessed,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and a historian of the vice presidency. “I think a lot of people will conclude that it’s better to have a vice president who has the kind of accountability that you have when you’re running for the presidency yourself. It’s better to have an administration that wants to get that third term.”

Shrouded in Secrecy

Congress isn't completely helpless when a vice president becomes so powerful. It has some oversight tools: Since Congress provides the funds for his staff, it could limit the staff’s size if it appeared that the vice president was getting involved in too many activities, according to Louis Fisher, a constitutional law specialist at the Library of Congress and author of “The Politics of Executive Privilege.”

But in Cheney’s case, the size of his staff and office budget are semi-secret. Cheney’s office won’t talk about them. The part of his budget that shows up clearly in appropriations bills is less than $7 million — roughly $2 million in Legislative Branch spending, since he serves as the Senate president, and the rest in the Financial Services appropriations bill to fund his executive branch duties and his residence, which is on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. (A dispute arose in 2001 in Congress when it became known that the Navy was paying Cheney’s power bills.)

The most credible estimates of the size of Cheney’s staff put it at about 80 employees. And although Cheney beefed up his national security staff, former aides and independent analysts don’t think there was an explosive growth in the overall size of the staff after he took office.

Bradley H. Patterson Jr., who has studied the vice presidential staff for an update of his 2000 book, “The White House Staff: Inside the West Wing and Beyond,” estimates that Cheney’s office includes about 86 staff members, including some detailed from other federal agencies.

The practice makes it hard to pin down exact numbers and compare them from one administration to another, Patterson said. But he believes that Al Gore’s vice presidential office was about the same size, and if the roughly 60 federal employees who worked on his Reinventing Government initiative were included, Gore’s staff would have been much bigger than Cheney’s.

Congress also has indirect methods of protesting unpopular actions by the vice president, such as holding up nominations in the Senate, Fisher said. Lawmakers could even put conditions on the funds for the vice president’s office — such as prohibiting the use of his staff to help draft bill signing statements, according to Scott Lilly, a former House Appropriations aide and currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. So far, there is no sign that Congress is considering any such actions against Cheney.

An Often Vacant Office: Click here for the graphic

Still, there are limits on what Congress can do. It can’t subpoena him, lawmakers say, because that would instantly set off a constitutional struggle over separation of powers. “We can’t get him in front of us,” said Sen. Carl Levin , the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

And Congress’ more routine oversight powers were effectively curtailed in 2002 when the Government Accounting Office (GAO) —subsequently renamed Government Accountability Office — lost its lawsuit that sought to force Cheney to disclose the names of everyone who met with the energy policy task force he headed for Bush. The White House argued that those discussions were private and protected by the Constitution.

Waxman said it would be “problematic” for Congress to try to question Cheney as long as he acts in his capacity as vice president. But Waxman did ask for documents about the energy task force in 2002 — leading to the GAO lawsuit when Cheney refused to hand them over — because “I thought that was out of the bounds of his traditional duties as vice president.”

An Election Issue

What’s left, then, is the leverage of presidential elections.

In the aftermath of Cheney’s tenure, questions about how much power the vice presidential candidates will have if they’re elected will be “fair game,” said Andrew C. Rudalevige, a presidential expert at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. “You’ll have more questions about that: What exactly do you intend to have this person do in your administration?”

Such questions are particularly important, according to Wilkerson, Secretary Powell’s former aide, because the president needs more and more help with the complexity of issues with international scope, from terrorism to global warming.

“If that’s accepted, that the vice presidency is going to remain more powerful than it was in the past, then yes, I do think we need to start thinking more critically about who we elect to that office,” said Wilkerson. “I think you have to go back to [Secretary of State Henry A.] Kissinger to find an example where so much power was concentrated in one individual.”

Elections aren’t perfect corrective mechanisms. Judging from what lawmakers and political operatives say about him now, much of the discussion of Cheney’s legacy in 2008 will probably be distorted by partisan politics. Democrats can be expected to condemn his as a villain. “He’s been so visible, so wrong, so misleading,” said Levin. “He’s certainly been part of the distortions that led up to the war.” The result of that record, Levin said, is that the next vice presidential candidates deserve to draw “more than the usual amount of interest” in 2008.

Republicans say Cheney won’t be a factor in the campaigns at all — even those who have not been shy about criticizing the Bush administration.

“I don’t think it changes anything. We’ve had unpopular vice presidents before,” and they didn’t draw more scrutiny to the office in the next election,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, one of a group of House Republicans who warned Bush last month that the party was growing restless on Iraq.

The partisan divide also means that the Democratic presidential candidates may be more inclined to think about the need for limits on vice presidential power than the Republican candidates, according to strategists from both parties.

“I don’t think anyone’s going to want to use the Cheney model. I think it’ll be more like the Mondale model,” said Democratic strategist Steven A. Elmendorf, who was the deputy campaign manager for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry ’s presidential campaign in 2004.

But Republican pollster Steve Lombardo thinks the power of the vice presidency will be an issue mainly for the media, not for the candidates or the public. As long as the running mates don’t actually hurt the campaigns, “I just don’t think vice presidents are that important in presidential elections,” Lombardo said. The voters will be so fixated on the fresh faces in the wide-open presidential field, he said, that “that’s going to be plenty for the public to digest.”

Mondale, however, thinks the election is the best chance for the public to prevent a repeat of the Cheney vice presidency and “get an understanding from the next presidential nominees that they’re not going to go down that road.” Given the lack of constitutional or legal constraints and the fact that impeachment proceedings would be an overreaction — a “sideshow,” in his view — “I can’t come up with anything that works other than the political context,” he said.

Indeed, some scholars of the vice presidency think the Cheney experience might encourage presidential candidates to set limits on the next vice president’s role, even if they’re not pressed to do so.

No. 2 by the Numbers: Click here for the graphic

“It’s hard to imagine any of the current candidates saying, ‘I want to do it the way Bush did it,’ ” said Goldstein. “If they’re smart, they’re going to want a vice president who can really help them. But they’re not basically going to want to turn over the car keys.”

‘Extraordinary Circumstances’

It may be that the power of the vice presidency has already peaked — because of the unique nature of the Bush-Cheney relationship and the unusual amount of experience Cheney brought to the job — and that a repeat performance isn’t likely anyway.

“It’s hard to imagine that anybody will ever bring more to the job than Dick Cheney did,” said Yates. “These were some pretty extraordinary circumstances.”

Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois says “all the stars aligned correctly” for Cheney. “He probably had more experience than any vice president we’ve known in history. He was part of an administration that had little to no experience governing.” Cheney took that combination, LaHood said, “and played it to a fare-thee-well.”

“I don’t know how that kind of scenario could develop again,” he said.

To be sure, though, Mondale says the next president and vice president need to work out a detailed understanding of the boundaries of the job, much as he and Carter worked out his responsibilities in writing before they took office.

“I would say that a vice president should never speak for the president and his administration without the approval of the president,” Mondale said. “You can chill advice within the government, advice that would otherwise come up, because everyone thinks you’re speaking for the president. There should be an understanding that that can’t happen.”

There may be a built-in incentive for the presidential nominees to set public limits on the job — to declare that while the vice president would play an important role in the administration, the president would still be in charge. “The next president will have an un-Cheney, in a sense,” said Rudalevige. “I think the next president will be very cautious about even having the appearance of being overshadowed, of having someone else pull the strings.”

But since the vice president’s authority depends so strongly on the relationship with the president, others say the voters would be wise to consider the whole ticket, including the relative strengths and weaknesses of the presidential and vice presidential candidates, to be sure that the president will be the true power center.

“People just said, ‘Look at who he’s got on his team. He’s got Cheney. He’s got Rumsfeld. Oh my God, he’s got Colin Powell. They can all compensate for Bush’s lack of foreign policy experience,’ ” said Wilkerson. “No one thought about the other side of that, which is that all these pachyderms would fight it out, often right over the president’s head.”

And as a safeguard against political isolation, Fuller said, the next presidential nominees shouldn’t be afraid to pick a vice president who might want their job someday — and would therefore have to answer to the voters on a regular basis.

“I do think that by not having a vice president running for the nomination, the administration loses a little bit of the political judgment they might have had, and they lose a spokesman who can defend them on the campaign trail,” Fuller said.

Both Bush and Cheney have been proud of their refusal to shift their views according to the latest polls. Leadership, Cheney says, is about doing “what we think is right.” And the next president might agree. But with a less-powerful vice president, and one who has to stay in touch with the voters, the next president might also be more responsive to what the public thinks is right.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Background, 2006 CQ Weekly, p. 2858; Cheney and Iraq, 2005 CQ Weekly, p. 2816; Cheney on the Hill, 2003 CQ Weekly, p. 1306; GAO lawsuit, 2002 Almanac, p. 1-15.