Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney delivers this with the dry pragmatism of a man who treats democracy like a numbers problem he’s already solved. The first punchline is political: nobody picks a running mate to “carry Wyoming,” a state so reliably Republican it’s practically a rounding error. The line flatters no one; it shrugs at the performative myth that vice presidential picks are about geographic balance. In Cheney’s telling, the real reason is power, access, and competence - and he doesn’t bother to dress that up.

The subtext lands harder in the second sentence, where he pivots from inevitability (“70 percent”) to contingency (“those three electoral votes”). It’s an inside-baseball wink that also doubles as a warning: even the smallest pieces of the Electoral College can become decisive when the system is close enough to creak. “Last time around” is doing a lot of work, pointing straight at 2000 without re-litigating it. Cheney doesn’t need to say “Florida” or “Supreme Court” for the reader to hear them anyway.

Context matters: this is post-2000 America, when faith in electoral inevitability got replaced by a queasy awareness of how a presidency can hinge on margins, procedures, and quirks. The intent isn’t inspiration; it’s justification and normalization. Cheney is saying: the game is won by understanding the machinery, not by pretending the machinery is romantic. The joke is that he’s right - and the discomfort is that he sounds pleased about it.