Is Sarah Palin (or Joe Biden) the next Dick Cheney?

The article I chose from Slate was “Is Sarah Palin (or Joe Biden) the next Dick Cheney?” by Barton Gellman. This piece focuses on Dick Cheney’s use of executive power that had never been seen before in any Vice President in our country’s history, and whether or not Sarah Palin will continue Cheney’s commanding presence in a McCain-Palin administration. The author was very clear in outlying his evidence and analysis of Cheney’s use of power over these past years, specifically during the Justice Department’s “meltdown,” as he described, in 2004, and how Palin may in fact follow that path due to her recent comments. The author clearly has a liberal-minded bias in his writing from his intermittent jabs he throws at his astonishment with respect to Cheney’s history of power abuse. Another large focus of the article is showing how Sarah Palin will never be Dick Cheney. Gellman goes writes some of Palin’s highest quality lines (the few that she’s had) over this election season and shows that she has no idea what the office of the Vice President actually does, and that she has no team of advisors like Cheney’s Addington to fall back on for advice and guidance on constitutional law.

Also, in essence the author mocks Palin’s stance on the Bush Doctrine of foreign policy (preemptive warfare) in that she doesn’t listen to the top of the ticket, John McCain, when it comes to his own polices on that matter. The target audience of the article, however, is most defiantly people who are educated in United States politics and recent events. There are many references to recent issues in the last few months to last eight years that would be unknown to people not paying attention to the media and other forms of information. In the end, the article is very true when it comes to the facts that the author noted, yet at the same time he is trying to make the point that Sarah Palin will never have the ability or knowledge to be able to lead an administration the way Dick Cheney has since 2000.