The next Dick Cheney?

As John McCain scrambles to find someone to be his running mate, most media attention has been on the alleged electoral benefit that various candidates could bring to the Republican ticket. Very little attention, so far, has been paid to what those candidates stand for.

America made the same mistake in 2000. No one paid much attention to Dick Cheney when he, apparently, selected himself as Bush’s running mate. Yet had anyone looked into his record dating back to the Nixon years, it would’ve been obvious that he’d turn into a disaster. With a demonstrated contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, it was evident how bad Cheney would be for America, if only we’d bothered to look.

Now the Democratic Party is helping us to avoid making that mistake again. Sure, they have a partisan interest in slamming Republican candidates, but who else is going to tell us the uncomfortable truths about them? So far, the mainstream media has shown no interest in critical analysis of the potential candidates.

So the Democrats created a site, The Next Cheney, to reveal some of those uncomfortable truths about McCain’s potential running mates. The problems run from the mundane—campaign finance irregularities—to the expected—taking positions on issues that the majority of Americans would never support. On McCain’s list we see political opportunists, “slash and burn” corporate leaders aggressively pursuing self-interest and, like McCain himself, a group marching in virtual lock-step with George Bush.

Back in 2001, McCain said to Cheney, "With a little more luck, I might have been able to ask you to be my Vice-President." We need to know what McCain’s Dick Cheney really stands for, and the Democrats' site is an important first step.