A liberal Dick Cheney

Alex Rossmiller, writing in a negligible little rag called The American Prospect asks a provocative question:

What if the next vice president sustained the Cheney model -- but as a progressive?  The vice presidency, of course, was long a famously powerless and thankless post. Scholars and analysts widely consider Al Gore the first to break that mold; he was deemed the most influential vice president ever, until Cheney's tenure made Gore's influence look like that of a precinct captain.

But I think it's pretty clearly true that Cheney has become so powerful in large part because he's working for a president who, on his own, is feckless and weak and largely without vision. (That and the whole 9/11 thing.) So if the Democratic party (and, indeed, the rest of the country) is in the unfortunate position of one day being subjected to a similarly inept Democratic president, then it'll be crucial to have a progressive body-checker--with Cheney-type power--as number two. But in the meantime, I'd say it's probably better for liberals to push for a good, competent progressive to be the actual president, whose vice-president is also effective and also progressive, but not necessarily one whose political weight is as outsize as Cheney's is.