Bill Press is co-host of CNN's Crossfire. He is providing exclusive analysis to CNN allpolitics.com during the election season.

Bill Press: Convention's only story is Dick Cheney's record

By Bill Press/CNN

PHILADELPHIA (CNN) -- The Republican National Convention opens today with a new, official theme song: Home on the Range. You know the line: "where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day."

Under what George W. Bush himself described to the New York Times as his "iron-fisted rule," Republicans have crafted one of the nicest conventions in history and, certainly, one of the most boring. There will be no debate or disagreement on the platform or new primary rules. Any dissent was squashed ahead of time by Bush operatives. There will be, we are told, no attacks on Al Gore or Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bush staff have been assigned to preview texts of all speeches to remove any harsh language. And congressional leaders Tom DeLay, and Dick Armey, both conservative Republicans from Texas, been banned from the podium because they just might slip and say something nasty (how out of character!) and so spoil the week's positive tone.

The whole program is as sugar-sweet as cotton candy -- and just as artificial.

As nominee, it's Bush's prerogative, of course, to shape the convention any way he wants. But defanging it entirely could backfire by turning off potential viewers. The possibility of witnessing a good, healthy political donnybrook is the reason why people tune to conventions, not to watch pre-packaged speeches and choreographed demonstrations. After all, there are a lot of other TV options, like watching grass growing on the Discovery Channel, which is 10 times more exciting than anything they'll see from Philadelphia.

But Bush's strategy of making sure there's no news in Philly has already backfired in another, more significant way. With nothing else to talk about, the only story in town remains Dick Cheney's record and whether his selection represents Bush's first major gaffe.

Quick to rally around Bush's choice, right or wrong, Republicans tried two different arguments: First, insisting that Cheney's a nice, mild-mannered man whom even Democrats get along with -- which is true, but meaningless. Even nice guys can have ugly voting records, and Cheney's is uglier than most.

Second argument: Democrats were distorting Cheney's record. Nonsense. Democrats didn't distort Cheney's record. They merely cited his record, chapter and verse, straight from the pages of the Congressional Record. It just sounds so indefensible that the Bushies -- who obviously didn't check his record ahead of time -- assumed it had to be distorted.

Even more conclusively, Dick Cheney himself doesn't accuse anyone of distorting his record. He defends it. "It's there. It's my record. I'm proud of it," he defiantly told CBS's Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" on Sunday morning. With those words, he defended votes against funding of Head Start; against the Equal Rights Amendment; against federal funding for abortion, with no exceptions; against creation of the Department of Education; against refunding of the Clean Water Act; against a ban on armor-piercing, "cop-killer" bullets; and against a resolution asking the South African government to release Nelson Mandela from prison.

But it's not just Cheney's record in Congress that raises serious questions about his selection, it's his record in the Pentagon and in private business.

As secretary of defense, Cheney gave at least two exclusive briefings, in the Pentagon, for Republican fat cats. These special events, for $5,000 donors, were billed by the Republican National Committee as opportunities for contributors "to build lasting relationships" with important government officials. When challenged by Sam Donaldson on "This Week" about introducing politics into the Pentagon, Cheney could only babble: "I don't know the details. I do know for a fact, we never raised money in the Pentagon."

Does that sound familiar? It's the very same defense offered by Bill Clinton for the White House coffees, and by Al Gore for the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple.

And then there's Big Oil Executive Cheney, who traveled to Venezuela and the Middle East last winter and returned to tell oil executives he had "good news" -- that OPEC nations had agreed to curtail production and thus raise oil prices -- which was bad news, of course, for Americans stuck paying higher gas prices at the pumps.

So there you have it, the only news out of Philadelphia: Dick Cheney's record is anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-gun control, anti-environment and anti-consumer. Too bad George W. Bush has given us nothing else to talk about.