Dick Cheney Ends Term Highly Unpopular

Vice President Dick Cheney will go down in history as an arrogant, dishonest and wrongheaded politician, a man who never doubted his own ability to fool most of the people most of the time.

As National Public Radio reported last week (see our earlier post), Cheney worked behind the scenes to manipulate everyone he could, including the president. (Lest we forget, this is the man who Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe brought to Tulsa for a fundraiser.)

Here's a note on the Cheney legacy from Time.com. Note that Cheney was involved in almost all of the Bush Administration's mistakes, which no doubt accounts for the VP's huge unfavorable poll numbers.

It will be months and probably years before the full scope of Cheney's power — where it started and stopped — will be fully understood. Many Bush critics have traced the biggest failures of the Bush presidency — like the obsession with weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade Iraq — to the office of the Vice President. But Cheney leaves Washington as the most powerful Vice President in decades, perhaps ever.

Yet Cheney is also one of the least popular Vice Presidents ever. A New York Times/CBS News poll gave Bush a final 22% favorability rating, which was nearly twice that of his Vice President, whose approval rating stood at an anemic 13%.