VEEP DOO-DOO.(The Talk of the Town)(Vice-President of the United States)

According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the "favorability" rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the "Daily Show" star's going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN's "Larry King Live." When King barked out the number--"Cheney eighteen per cent"--Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, "Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum." That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum.

The Vice-Presidency isn't what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history's most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons--his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss--he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign--not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

That same CBS News poll put President Bush's favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President's lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially.

As some conservatives noted, no one died at Armstrong, unlike at Chappaquiddick in 1969 (or Weehawken in 1804). As no conservatives noted, unlike at the Watergate, no one at the ranch set out to commit a standard-issue crime; unlike in the Iran-Contra case, no one traded arms for hostages, illegally funded foreign guerrillas, or lied to Congress. A trivial offense, if offense it was, was followed by an outsized, politically tinged overreaction. In this sense, the Armstrong gunplay was more like the Clinton-Lewinsky business, although the overreactions were on different scales: a weeklong cable-TV brouhaha versus a yearlong vendetta featuring prosecutorial skulduggery, the expenditure of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and the culminating grotesquerie of impeachment and acquittal.

Now that the Armstrong incident has receded into the mists of time, where it can be calmly considered in historical perspective, the shotgunning of Harry Whittington, in itself, does indeed appear as of less than global significance. To be sure, certain details of the original competing narratives turn out to have been slightly askew, adding up to a political wash. "Cheney shot an old man in the face," for example. Yes, Whittington is full of years--seventy-eight of them--but the suggestion of decrepitude is misleading; he is a still-practicing (and public-spirited) lawyer in robust health. And he was shot not only in the face but also, we now know, in the chest. (He had a heart attack the way Nancy Kerrigan had a knee attack.) ...