What if we nominated Cheney?

Ross Douthatt imagines that Dick Cheney had been the GOP nominee in 2008. Here's the core of his case:

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

. . . .

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability. ... And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

(Emphasis in original.) I'm inclined to disagree with pretty much everything in here. I'm not convinced that the flavor of "conservatism" that is "ascendent" in the party today--I take that to be a reference to Glenn Beck, the tea partiers and so forth--is representative of, or even particularly congruent with, Dick Cheney's views. Nor am I convinced that, whether one defines conservatism broadly or narrowly, the analysis that we lost ground because we weren't "conservative" enough is fundamentally wrong. (Handed the reins of power, the party did not govern as conservatives, although I concede that the reality is less important for purposes of analyzing electoral returns than are perceptions.)

Even granting these premises, however, I'm fairly sure that Ross is wrong that a Cheney-Obama fight would have been a clean one ending in a definitive rejection of the thesis Ross evidently thinks is wrong. No matter what Cheney brought to the table by himself, no matter that (as Ross concedes) he "kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform ... [and] the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda," Cheney would have been perceived as playing for the third term of the Bush-Cheney administration. There are several reasons why McCain lost, but the most fundamental reason of all was the public's frustration and dissatisfaction with the Bush administration; that would have gone a fortiori had the Vice-President of that administration been the nominee. But it would have been frustration with the Bush administration, which failed to govern as conservatives, that sunk the Cheney '08 campaign, which preserves ample room for essentially the same diagnosis (whether one agrees with it or not) that Ross would take to task.