Jon Meacham; Cheney Should Run

I Guess Jon Meacham’s readership

must be tanking and someone told him to say something controversial. This is probably the silliest bit of opinion journalism that I’ve seen in the last week and, believe me the competition is stiff.

Here are the introductory paragraphs:

Gallup is not asking about him in its prospective polling, and his daughter Liz’s recent Fox News Sunday allusion to a presidential run provoked good-natured laughter, as though the suggestion were just a one-liner. Float the hypothetical in political conversation, and people roll their eyes dismissively.

But I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

And this isn’t a clever setup where the author reveals the punchline later in the article, Meacham is playing it straight. He has no problem with reducing America’s choice to sane middle ground vs Neocon war criminal. That is really no choice and would produce a de facto one party state. Cheney could never win it is that simple, the numbers have never been there for him personally or politically.

Meacham goes on to posit this:

But the middle moves depending on where the poles of right and left are standing at a particular moment. Given Cheney’s views, even conservatives who dislike him or think it is time to open a new chapter might give the possibility another thought, for it seems much more likely that Cheney would pull Obama to the right than that Obama would pull Cheney to the left. I think it is safe to say that neither a Huckabee nor a Palin bid would have the same effect.

Note the blind acceptance of the official Teabag / MSNBC/Newsweek watercooler position that Obama is way out there, governing to the left of Lenin despite all the evidence to the contrary which actually puts Obama firmly in the center.

Just for fun here is what some on Twitter think: