Vice President Cheney was asked on Fox News about concerns that the Iraq war was hurting Republicans. “We didn’t get elected to be popular,” Cheney said. “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican party.” ~Bill Kristol

It is true that voters do not elect representatives out of purely partisan interest, but presumably think that they are acting in the best interests of the country.  It is not always the case that the voters are right about the latter, but Cheney is right that narrow partisan gain is not the main reason why voters elect members of Congress and Presidents.  If he is so indifferent to questions of popularity, it is strange, then, that for the better part of its first five years the administration has governed with a very keen eye to using every lever and mechanism at its disposal to maximise Republican gains.  They didn’t get elected to be popular, but they were surely going to do everything they could to game the system and turn everything to their advantage and to magnify their popularity as much as they could.  This is called politics.  It was a particularly aggressive and nasty form of politics at times, but politics all the same.  There would have been a time when nothing would have commanded the administration’s attention more than the fortunes of the party–sustaining and expanding the Republican majority were the explicit goals of the Rove political machine and became the overriding goals in setting domestic policy.   Now that the “permanent majority” machine has broken down and lies wrecked on the side of the road, behold how high-minded and concerned about the common good Mr. Cheney has become!  See how he stands above the petty grasping pols who worry about their positions of power–not like the noble sage of the Naval Observatory!  Of course, Mr. Cheney has the luxury of never having to run for election again and can be unusually dismissive of public opinion in a way that elected representatives cannot and should not be.

I imagine that the 11 “moderate” Republicans who approached Mr. Bush about the damage Iraq was doing to the GOP were trying to speak to Mr. Bush in a language he might be able to understand: they tried to explain Iraq in terms of electoral politics, because no other kind of appeal was reaching Mr. Bush.  Instead of showing appreciation for their sounding of the warning bell, the administration seems to think it is more appropriate to cast them as selfish cynics.