Democrats Welcome Cheney With Open Arms

Aboard Air Force Two this week they were passing out buttons that said “WIN.” It was not a look ahead to November but a look back 25 years, to the last time Dick Cheney served in the White House and “Whip Inflation Now” was President Ford’s rallying cry.

If Republicans are pleased with George W. Bush’s selection of running mate Cheney, Democrats seem positively ecstatic, convinced the ticket sets up a stark generational contrast while raising doubts about how compassionate Bush’s newfangled “compassionate conservatism” really is.

“He’s a retro-choice, a member of your daddy’s Republican Party,” Mark Fabiani, a strategist for Vice President Al Gore, asserted Wednesday. “In a time of a new economy and a new century, we’re happy to be on the side of new leadership against what is clearly the Old Guard.”

At the same time, Bush’s failure to push the political envelope means Gore now faces much less pressure to counter with a flashy vice presidential pick of his own.

Putting Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a woman or a backer of abortion rights on the GOP ticket would have been a dramatic play for the support of moderate and independent voters. A big-state governor, such as Pennsylvania’s Thomas J. Ridge, might have forced Gore to counter with Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.

Instead, Gore can approach his own selection with a much freer hand to shape a ticket that can appeal to the crucial center. Gore is expected to make his pick sometime after next week’s Republican National Convention.

In the meantime, Democrats from President Clinton on down were fairly bursting Wednesday at the chance to highlight Cheney’s unswervingly conservative record in Congress, which includes numerous votes against abortion and gun control--issues of symbolic importance to many swing voters.

At a Gore campaign stop in Chicago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson wove a scathing attack on Cheney into his introduction of the vice president to about 300 African Americans attending a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference.

With Gore at his side, Jackson cited a litany of votes that Cheney cast in Congress, where he represented Wyoming for 10 years after serving as Ford’s White House chief of staff. They included opposition to sanctions against South African apartheid, a resolution calling for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the Head Start child-care program and advance notice of plant closings for workers.

“Beneath the veneer lies an individual of extreme views,” Jackson told members of the civil rights organization he founded.

For his part, Gore used Bush’s selection of Cheney as a way to sharpen the contrasts he has sought to draw between himself and his GOP rival.

“Gov. Bush has made his choice,” Gore told the group, which responded with enthusiastic applause. “And now there can be absolutely no doubt that when the American people go to the polls this November, they will be choosing between two very different visions for our future.

“It is a choice between the Old Guard--that gave us deficits, divisions and social injustice in the past--and a new vision of prosperity and progress, investment, inclusion and growth to lift up all of our people.”

Clinton, making his first public comments on Cheney’s selection, voiced the same sentiment. “Having Mr. Cheney come on the ticket will help to clarify that there are big, profound differences between the two leaders and the tickets, and that those differences will have real consequences for the country,” he told reporters at the White House. “There are big differences on the environment, on gun safety, on a woman’s right to choose, on civil rights enforcement and on economic policy.”

More broadly, the Gore camp and its allies sought to portray Cheney’s selection as a capitulation to the Republican right wing and proof that Bush is hardly the benevolent, softer-edged conservative he has made himself out to be.

“It finally made clear a lot about him and about the character of the Republican Party,” said Bob Shrum, an ad maker for Gore and other leading Democrats. “The far right said ‘absolutely not’ to John McCain and [Bush] gave in there. The far right said ‘absolutely not’ to Tom Ridge”--a supporter of some abortion rights--”and he bowed there.”

Further, Shrum asserted, by reaching back to his father’s administration--where Cheney served as Defense secretary--and tapping a long-standing member of the white-male Washington establishment, Bush did nothing to fulfill his promise of a more inclusive GOP. “It gives you the sense Bush has a rather narrow idea of diversity,” Shrum said. “I guess diversity is presidents of two different oil companies.”

In Austin, a spokesman for the Bush camp labeled the assault on Cheney “attack-dog, old-style politics.”

“It shows the vice president doesn’t have his own positive agenda to talk about,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

But Democrats were just warming up. Today, Gore begins a weeklong vacation on the North Carolina coast. In his absence, proxies will visit the Midwest, which saw record-high gas prices this summer, to attack Bush and Cheney for their respective ties to the oil industry. “We have events planned over the next several days to draw people’s attention to the all-oil, all-the-time ticket,” Fabiani promised.

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.