Cheney Takes Race at Staid, Somber Pace

The lights go out and the speakers start pumping out drum-pounding, can’t-stop-dancing electronic music. The cheers of the crowd turn to full-throated shouts. The spotlight finds the campaign bus arriving at livestock pavilion No. 3 at the Greene County Fair and Expo Center. And out ambles the 63-year-old candidate, professorial in herringbone brown and tasseled oxblood slip-ons, his shoulders hunched forward.

This is Vice President Dick Cheney on the campaign trail. The song is “Get Ready for This,” by techno band 2 Unlimited. He looks like he’d prefer Mozart.

Cheney’s manner is not one of a pumped-up candidate sprinting to the finish line of a heated election, but of someone moving at his own measured pace.

And yet day after day, from West Virginia to Pennsylvania, in Minnesota and Nevada, the vice president has proven to be an effective instrument of the Bush campaign. His role most often is to offer harsh denunciations of Sen. John F. Kerry that either supplement the president’s own attacks or keep pressure on the Democratic presidential candidate while Bush promotes a positive message.

On Tuesday, Cheney’s somber side was again on display as he spotlighted the prospect of the “ultimate threat” -- a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists.

Reiterating one of the mainstays of his stump speech for supporters in Carroll, Ohio, Cheney said: “The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind, to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”

As he usually does, he expressed skepticism about Kerry’s pledge to aggressively pursue the war on terrorism.

“I don’t believe it,” the vice president said. “I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the proposition that he would, in fact, do it.”

Kerry campaign officials fired back at Cheney for his comments.

“He has the audacity to question whether a decorated combat veteran who has bled on the battlefield is tough and aggressive enough to keep America safe,” the campaign said in a statement. “He wants to scare Americans about a possible nuclear 9/11 while the Bush administration has been on the sidelines while the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran -- the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism -- have increased.”

Cheney on Tuesday continued to express dismay about Kerry’s mention in the final presidential debate that Mary Cheney, one of the vice president’s daughters, is a lesbian.

Cheney himself referred to his daughter’s sexual orientation when discussing gay marriage at a campaign stop in August. And Kerry has said he broached Mary Cheney’s name “to say something positive about the way strong families deal” with the gay marriage issue.

But the Bush campaign has said it was inappropriate for Kerry to mention Mary Cheney in the Oct. 13 debate. Since then, Republicans have regularly revisited the flap.

“Mary is a private person.... I think she shared our sense that this was not appropriate,” the vice president told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “It’s the first time I can recall where one presidential candidate tried to drag the family of another into -- to make a political point, some kind of policy point in connection with the presidential debates.”

For nearly four decades, Cheney has been deeply involved in political campaigns -- as a volunteer, a staff member (he was President Ford’s chief of staff), and eight times as a candidate -- first for Wyoming’s U.S. House seat he initially won in 1978 and then for the vice presidency.

He demonstrates no outward joy for the process. For much of his time on the road, at the question-and-answer sessions with GOP supporters or at “round-table” discussions with perhaps a dozen people at small-town coffee shops and restaurants, Cheney could be leading a political science seminar, albeit one with a conservative bent.

Every now and then, the colloquialisms of his earlier life in Casper, Wyo., slip out.

Kerry, he said on Tuesday, had a 20-year record of votes on national security matters and now “he is trying to hide it, to cover it up by using a little tough talk.”

“As we like to say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but at the end of the day, it’s still a pig,” he told a cheering throng at the Greene County fairground.

Vice presidential candidates traditionally carry their party’s message to the byways of America, often traveling to smaller towns where crowds fill barns and the hangars of county airports, rather than the big sports arenas favored by the top of the ticket.

Of late, Cheney has been doing that five or six days a week. This week, he set out on Monday and plans only one day off before election day.

On Tuesday, one of the challenges he faced on the campaign trail involved a box a pumpkin doughnuts.

Cheney eyed with suspicion the box that a bypasser held out as he walked down the main street of Circleville, Ohio. Prudence would suggest that someone who has had four heart attacks would view the pastries just as he did.

But he took a bite, and not a small one, before handing the doughnut to his wife, Lynne. A second doughnut was offered. He sampled that one too.

Then, once again, he ambled along, to shake hands down a line of Ohioans on the eve of the pumpkin fair.

Lynne Cheney pronounced judgment on the doughnut.

“To die for,” she said.