"Big Time" Punches In

ERIC DRAPER/WHITE HOUSE
When the President chats up guests, Cheney listens, inscrutable behind his smirk

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Like Vice Presidents Gore and Dan Quayle, Cheney has a standing weekly lunch date with his President. The one-on-one with the boss is among a Veep's most coveted perks. For all the alleged closeness between Gore and Bill Clinton, Gore had to ask for his lunch and fight to keep it on Clinton's schedule. For Cheney and Bush, however, the Thursday meal is almost superfluous since they spend so much of their day together. (In addition to the morning briefing and scheduled events, they reunite in the Oval Office every afternoon for economic- and domestic-policy meetings.) But the lunch is important because the two men are completely alone. There they discuss issues like whether some adviser has too broad a portfolio or whether a new Cabinet Secretary can handle a looming challenge.

Cheney's lunch with Bush may be the least interesting of his midday meals. Each Tuesday the Vice President plans to travel to the Senate for the Republican conference lunch, and he has promised to make regular visits to the House on Wednesdays. Such visits are rare. When Quayle, the last Veep to have regular lunch dates on the Hill, met with Senators, he was not seen as a significant conduit to the White House. Cheney, however, sends all kinds of strong signals. Republican Senators already consider him their 51st member, the one who will be needed to break tie votes. Even more important, they see him as a reliable link to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. "He has the delivery system and the capacity" to carry messages to and from the President, says a senior Senate aide. In meetings with lawmakers, Cheney holds back more than he holds forth. He doesn't work the room but sits quietly until he is introduced. Then he lays out the agenda quickly and without gassing on and on, a laconic style that few others in the room practice. He takes questions, but mostly he listens.

Inside Washington's chatterbox culture, Cheney's silence and trademark smirk make people nervous. In his office a picture from his Gulf War days captures the perfect Cheney pose--former President Bush and General Colin Powell standing in the foreground while Cheney lurks in the background with what an aide calls his "cockeyed look," his shoulders hunched and a slanted, slightly menacing smile on his face. Since his days as Gerald Ford's chief of staff and, later, as second-ranking Republican in the House, that look has invited all manner of interpretations. Returning from White House meetings last week, Republicans and Democrats were puzzling over what the man in the background was thinking. "He just sits there with a cat's grin," remarked one legislator. Maybe it was that opaque quality that Bush was referring to early last week when 15 Republican and Democratic Senators sat down at the long table in the White House Cabinet room and the President said, "Welcome to Cheney's charm offensive."

On the Hill, it's now widely assumed that while Bush spreads goodwill, Cheney will sow fear. He is the Administration's chief enforcer. His task is not to woo Democrats but to keep fractious Republicans in line. Senator John McCain got a glimpse of that Cheney two weeks ago, when he arrived at the White House for what he thought would be a private meeting with the President to discuss campaign-finance reform. Cheney was there too. And though Bush suggested he was open-minded about McCain's proposal to restrict campaign funding, Cheney made it clear he wasn't. McCain left the meeting wondering whose position would carry the day.

Cheney will be soothing the concerns of conservatives, who worry that Bush will give too much away to the Democrats to get legislation passed. House Speaker Denny Hastert--whose son landed a job on Cheney's staff--has taken to calling Cheney an extra whip, the vote-corralling job he held in his days as a Wyoming Congressman. As a Hastert aide says, "It's hard to turn the White House down when Cheney calls."

Cheney's biggest role may come in the sphere he mastered as Defense Secretary to the first President Bush--foreign policy. Last Wednesday the Vice President crossed the Potomac to the Pentagon for the first of another regular lunch session--this one with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Though all four are friends, and Rice and Powell worked with Cheney in the first Bush Administration, it has already become a Washington parlor game to guess who will prevail in the inevitable infighting. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld, who was Cheney's mentor in the Ford Administration, are far more hawkish than Powell. Cheney watchers believe Cheney installed Rumsfeld as a counterweight to the charismatic Powell.