What Do Cheney And Pelosi Have In Common?

No one will ever mistake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Dick Cheney for soul mates, but the two have a lot in common.

Lately, they have in common the issue of torture, and the burden of things they knew about it, did about it or said about it in the difficult months of late 2002 and early 2003.

Few periods in our history raise as many searching questions as that anxious year and a half between the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the Republican Cheney and Democrat Pelosi bear the weight of those months as it falls on their respective parties.

Cheney defends the use of "extreme techniques" while refusing to call waterboarding torture. Pelosi insists she did not know about waterboarding despite claims to the contrary, and she accuses the CIA of lying to her and to Congress.

Both have been cast as scapegoats by forces both within and beyond their control. They have chosen to speak out, but they were also compelled to do so by their histories.

Both these partisan leaders are products of the political struggles they have seen and sought over the past generation. They come to the events of our time as embodiments of the electoral and ideological combat of decades past.

It sometimes surprises people to realize that this man and woman represent the same political vintage. Cheney has long cultivated an image of seniority and experience, personifying the grumpy grandpa. For her part, Pelosi is just as well-known for a glamor and a spitfire style that belie her age.

Yet Pelosi, at 69, is actually 10 months older than Cheney, who is still 68.

So why does Cheney come across as her uncle? Possibly because he has been in Washington politics for four decades. Pelosi was still serving on the San Francisco Library Commission when Cheney moved up to chief of staff in the White House of President Gerald Ford. That was in 1975.

In the later 1970s, Cheney was elected to Congress from his native Wyoming and Pelosi became the Democratic Party chair for Northern California. In the 1980s, Cheney moved up into the inner circle of GOP leadership in the House. Pelosi became the party chair for California and a member of the Democratic National Committee, jobs that would accommodate the five children she still had at home.

When her youngest entered high school, Pelosi ran in a special election for a vacant seat and joined Cheney in Congress. That was in 1987.

The two were members of Congress together for less than two years. Early in 1989, Cheney left to become secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush. Pelosi stayed in the House, got on the Appropriations and Select Intelligence committees. Cheney flirted with a presidential run in the mid-'90s before settling into a corporate role at Halliburton.

Throughout the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the two could be found on opposite sides of the issues that divided Americans most profoundly: Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, nuclear weapons, taxes and defense spending, abortion, gun rights and gay rights, Supreme Court justices and the balance between energy and the environment.

Their careers were steeped in the conflicts of their time. And, in a sense, they are bound together today by their lifelong investment in those conflicts. For 30 years, they have each raised millions of dollars and logged countless air miles for congressional candidates, from safe incumbents to long-shot challengers.

Such labor in the field makes a difference, but it also takes a toll. It can wear even the happiest warrior down until little but warrior remains.

President Obama has said he wants to open a new epoch in American politics. Throughout his campaign, and in the weeks that followed his election, Obama said he saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. It was remarkable that he said this, in part because his own candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Iraq and other salient elements of the administration of George W. Bush. But he sensed that looking backward would be a distraction from his ambitious plans for the future.

Since his inauguration, of course, President Obama has found it increasingly difficult to maintain this focus. The past rises up on all sides, not just distracting but overwhelming. The torture conundrum, the photos of prisoner abuse, the fate of internees at Guantanamo, the next moves to be made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- all these persist, but the most perplexing is torture.

To some degree, Obama brought the torture issue to a boil himself by releasing in April the legal memos the Bush administration relied on to legitimize its interrogation methods. But his decision to do so reflected a realization that some issues from the past cannot be forgotten.

That is especially true when actors from the past remain so visibly onstage. In Pelosi's case, her role as senior House Democrat on Intelligence in 2002 clings to her. But more important, any culpability she has for what she may have known about torture at the time is magnified by her current elevation. The speaker, as everyone should know by now, stands next in the White House succession after the vice president.

Cheney's prominence is more voluntary. He might have left the capital and kept his own counsel. That's what his former bosses, both Presidents Bush, chose to do. But Cheney, the veteran of all these wars over all these years, cannot bring himself to leave the field.

Judging by recent polls, neither Cheney nor Pelosi has gained much popularity with their efforts to justify their performance in 2002 and 2003. Partisans on either side will defend their own, but watching these two war horses makes the rest of us wonder: What will it take to shake our preoccupation with the past?