Obama doesn’t just want to run against George W. Bush; he wants to run against Dick Cheney. Today he again accused McCain of “taking a page out of ‘the Cheney playbook’ on energy.” The problem with this analogy is that it’s wrong. Obama actually voted for Vice President Cheney’s energy legislation in the Senate, and McCain voted against it. And journalists are beginning to call Obama out for this sort of cynical name calling that does nothing to advance the dialogue Obama claims Americans are so desperately eager to engage in whenever McCain attacks him.
Democratic candidate Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain on Tuesday for taking a page out of “the Cheney playbook” on energy, overlooking his own support of oil-friendly policies that the unpopular vice president helped to craft. Obama voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by President Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, a measure for which Vice President Dick Cheney played a major role. McCain opposed the bill, saying at the time that it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry. The Obama campaign has said the Illinois senator supported the legislation because it included huge investments in renewable energy. Yet Democrats long have characterized the 2005 energy bill as being written by Cheney. One of them, Democratic primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, criticized Obama earlier this year for backing the “Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill.”
Even Democrats are picking up on the creepy similarties between Obama and Bush. Perhaps they’ll soon be citing the similarities between Obama and Cheney as well. Not that McCain has embraced the VP. Reports emerge today that McCain may not even want him at the convention. Whatever differences one might have with the vice president, I think Jonah Goldberg got it right in a column over a year ago:
Why do I like Dick Cheney? Because at a time when everybody talks a big game about how they don’t like people-pleasing politicians who live by the polls, Cheney is pretty much the only guy out there who walks the walk. He truly doesn’t care what people think about him. I love that.
