Dick Cheney and the Values of Wyoming   One day in 1975, when I was a junior at Natrona County High School in Casper, Wyoming, the entire student population was herded into the school auditorium to welcome Dick Cheney, then-President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff and our school’s most famous alumnus. I don’t recall the substance of Cheney’s remarks — he’s not known as an orator — but I’ve never forgotten the spirit of the occasion: great pride that one of our own had earned a place among the nation’s leaders.    Then as now, politics was a hotly divisive matter. On the one hand there was the national politics of Washington, which meant: Watergate, endless bickering and taxation, the corruption of both parties, the selfish bullying of “small” states like Wyoming by “big” states like New York as well as the federal government itself. And on the other hand, there was the Wyoming politics of practical, small-c conservative virtues: honesty, decency, statesmanship, conservationism, old-fashioned courtesy. National politics was Richard Nixon, who had recently resigned his presidency under a toxic cloud of disgrace and partisan acrimony; Wyoming politics was Ed Herschler, a popular Democrat three times elected governor of a largely Republican state.    Like Governor Herschler, Dick Cheney seemed to embody the very best of heartland America, and so maybe there was hope yet for our national politics if a Wyoming perspective could be brought to bear on Washington in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era.    Or so it seemed in 1975, and so it seemed again, a quarter-century later, when Cheney was selected as George W. Bush’s running mate. Many Americans were delighted that he would be the “grown-up” on the ticket; as vice president, Cheney would be a pragmatic “steady hand” who could be counted on to counterbalance ideologues like John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld. After nearly four years, it’s clear that Dick Cheney is President Bush’s most trusted advisor and perhaps the most powerful vice president in American history.    While Mr. Cheney’s impressive career — as a Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and CEO of the Halliburton Company — has unfolded mainly in Washington, D.C., and in Houston, Texas, he has always taken pains to assure his old constituents that his heart never left Wyoming, and that his values are still the values of Wyoming — candor, patriotism, common sense, plain-dealing.    So now it’s only fair to ask: What happened?    What kind of plain dealer conducts the very public business of drafting a national energy policy in fiercely guarded secrecy, and then uses the courts to ensure that the public is denied even the knowledge of who attended the deliberations?    What kind of conservationist sneers at efforts to reduce American dependence on petroleum as “personal virtue,” or allies himself with an administration that rolls back air-pollution standards in the name of “Clear Skies” and sanctions clear-cutting under the banner of “Healthy Forests”?    What kind of conservative helps to preside over the most calamitous turnabout of America’s fiscal standing since the Great Depression — a budgetary freefall of nearly $700 billion from surplus into deficit, an increase in the national debt of over $1.7 trillion, and the first net loss of American jobs since the Hoover Administration?    What kind of wise counselor urges war, insisting that Iraq possessed a vast arsenal of terror weapons poised against us, and that the Iraqi people would greet American liberators with cheers and flowers — all of which has been proven to be a tragic delusion? Or permits the issuance of no-bid contracts to his old business cronies in Halliburton, who then profiteer from that war and defraud American taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars? Or persists in making false claims of Iraqi complicity in the September 11 attacks, even when those claims are repudiated by the president himself?    What kind of patriot, in an election campaign said to be about “character,” impugns the valor of a much-decorated Vietnam War veteran when he himself avoided military service because he had “other priorities”? Or curses a political adversary on the floor of the Senate and then exults afterward that it felt good — this after a Bush-Cheney pledge to “restore honor and dignity” to our national government?    What kind of “steady hand” threatens the American electorate that a vote for his opponent is a vote for a terrorist attack on the United States? Are we now to ignore the obvious fact that, after repeated warnings, the September 11 attacks occurred on the Bush Administration’s watch?    What kind of statesman oversees a body of American foreign policy that has turned the United States into the most hated and mistrusted nation on earth? This is “security”?    The essence of conservatism, Wyoming style, is a careful stewardship of resources, whether they be resources of the land, our labor, our treasury, our trust, or the honor of our country. When it comes time to vote in November, consider what you value and how much has been squandered in the past four years.    Maybe it’s time for Dick Cheney to come home to Wyoming.   © Michael Fleming New York, New York September, 2004   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page