Who won? Who knows? While it was immediately clear last week that John Kerry won the first presidential debate, reaction to the vice-presidential debate was mixed. A CBS insta-poll has Edwards winning decisively; ABC, in a poll weighted heavily to Republicans, has Cheney on top. And except for Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss — who said that Cheney “took John Edwards out to the woodshed” — even the spinners were a little subdued. Democrats called Edwards youthful and energetic; Republicans said Cheney was steady, experienced and clearly in command.

Will any of it matter? Probably not. Even decisive vice-presidential debates don’t alter the outcome of elections — remember Vice President Lloyd Bentsen? — and this one wasn’t decisive. While each side claimed victory Tuesday, neither predicted that the debate would change the race. “These things are temporary,” said Bush-Cheney’s Ken Mehlman, “but I think this was good because it showed substance over rhetoric, and substance wins.” Kerry-Edwards advisor Tad Devine countered: “Dick Cheney’s job tonight was to stop the momentum, and he didn’t do it.”

Both Edwards and Cheney had their moments. Early on, before he ran out of steam, Cheney came off as confident and clear, even as he defended the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq. “What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do,” Cheney said in his first response. “If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action.” Edwards was all over him. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, “you are still not being straight with the American people.”

Cheney took a few direct shots at Edwards, too. When Edwards vowed that he and Kerry would defend America aggressively, Cheney shot back: “Your rhetoric, Senator, would be a lot more credible if there was a record to back it up. There isn’t.”

But as their exchanges dragged on, the candidates missed their targets as often as they hit them. Edwards frequently seemed a half-step off. When Cheney defended the reasons for starting a war, Edwards blasted him for misrepresenting the current conditions in Iraq. When Cheney talked up current conditions in Iraq, Edwards knocked him for linking Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11. When Cheney characterized Kerry as weak on defense, Edwards answered by saying that a “long résumé does not equal good judgment.” It was a good line, but by the time Edwards really needed it — late in the debate, in a response to a question about his relative inexperience — he’d already wasted it.

Edwards’ attacks sometimes seemed forced; he mentioned Halliburton at least a half-dozen times, sometimes stretching hard for a way to tie it into the conversation. And in a discussion on gay marriage, Edwards volunteered the fact that one of Cheney’s daughters is gay and praised the vice president for loving her anyway. It was gratuitous and weird, and it might have been disastrous if Cheney’s response hadn’t been every bit as strange. Given 60 seconds to respond to Edwards’ descriptions of the real-life problems facing gay couples, Cheney said: “Let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.”

It wasn’t the only odd choice the vice president made. When Gwen Ifill asked the candidates about Israel and the Middle East, Cheney passed on a chance to answer. Edwards launched a withering attack on Cheney’s record in Congress, noting that he’d voted against Head Start, against a prohibition on plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors, against the Department of Education, against Meals on Wheels, against a holiday for Martin Luther King and against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. Cheney’s response: Edwards’ “record speaks for itself. And frankly, it’s not very distinguished.”

When Edwards made an extended attack on Cheney for his Halliburton work — alleging that Halliburton, under Cheney, did business with Libya and Iran and was forced to pay fines for providing false information “just like Enron and Ken Lay” — Cheney responded by pointing to a “fact check” from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. But Annenberg’s work didn’t deal with the charges Edwards made; it dissected an ad in which the Kerry campaign took Cheney to task for his ongoing financial relationship with Halliburton. Annenberg’s central point: While Cheney continues to draw deferred compensation from Halliburton — $1.4 million two days before he took office and about $400,000 since then — that money isn’t contingent on the company’s current work in Iraq.

Cheney’s best line came midway through the debate. It just happened to be false. Minimizing Edwards’ political experience, Cheney said: “The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” Edwards didn’t call Cheney on it — another missed opportunity — but his wife did. Before Cheney left the debate stage, Elizabeth Edwards told the vice president that he had indeed met Edwards before, at a Senate prayer breakfast. Minutes after the debate ended, the Kerry-Edwards campaign circulated a photo showing Edwards and Cheney at the breakfast together.

Cheney offered up a few other falsehoods. He said, for example, that he has never “suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11.” In fact, Cheney has “suggested” it constantly and said it outright at least once: In a 2003 appearance on “Meet the Press,” Cheney said that Iraq was the “geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”

On style, the advantage probably went to Edwards, but not by much. Cheney wasn’t charming, but neither was he the dark lord that he sometimes seems to be — even if the loudspeakers in the press center gave his heavy breathing an unmistakable Darth Vader quality. The vice president actually looked up now and then, and his matter-of-fact style fit the advance billing from the Bush campaign: Cheney would be straightforward and gimmick-free. Predictably, Edwards was the more TV-ready of the two, but in his effort to match Cheney in knowledge, he seemed to cede some of his heart. Until his closing statement — when he spoke of watching his father teach himself math to better his career — Edwards offered little of the hopeful emotion that makes him so appealing. His “Two Americas” stump speech may be overdone and trite now, but it was hard not to long for it. Still, Edwards’ closing was far more appealing than Cheney’s; it would be hard to find a clearer contrast between messages of hope and fear.

For all the contrast, the debate wasn’t the knockout punch that either side might have hoped for. Both sides came loaded for bear. The Democrats shipped in three governors, two senators, a handful of former Cabinet secretaries, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, and almost a dozen Kerry-Edwards campaign advisors to help them spin the debate. The Republicans countered with campaign advisors Mary Matalin and Matthew Dowd, RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson and a host of other GOP notables.

But press interest was tepid; the gymnasium set aside for reporters was less than half full, and many of the campaign surrogates found themselves wandering without takers through the gym’s “spin alley.” Former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman looked bored, standing alone under a huge sign that bore his name. The Rev. Jesse Jackson watched CNN for a while, told a reporter that Edwards had “more energy” and “better command of his information,” then switched the subject to the future of Iraq and the suppression of the black vote in the United States.

If Cheney and Edwards want to feel better about their performances Tuesday night, they can take solace in this. As bad as they were, moderator Gwen Ifill was even worse. She lost track of the order of questioning at one point, then cut off Edwards mid-sentence in order to correct her error. She suggested — in a bizarre non sequitur — that Kerry and Edwards were “trying to have it both ways” by opposing gay marriage when Kerry comes from a state whose highest court backs gay marriage. She claimed, falsely, that Kerry “changed his mind about whether to authorize the president to go to war.” And she imposed — and then actually enforced — a silly rule prohibiting the candidates from mentioning their running mates by name while talking about their own qualifications.

Those running mates will be back on the main stage Friday night, when they meet in St. Louis for a town hall meeting. The vice-presidential sideshow will be over, and not a minute too soon.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

Cheney told Burnett:

The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. [...]

They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.

The former vice president has been insulting Obama  since Inauguration Day, insisting his policies will make the country “less safe.” Two months into his administration, Cheney charged that the new president “is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.” He’s accused Obama of “half measures” and “dithering” on foreign policy. And more than once he’s criticized the president for not taking a tougher stance on Iran.

Even after Obama authorized the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden, who Bush and Cheney essentially let run free thanks to their discretionary war with Iraq, Cheney wasn’t happy. “I still am concerned about the fact that I think a lot of the techniques that we had used to keep the country safe for more than seven years are no longer available. That they’ve been sort of taken off the table, if you will.”

So Cheney’s carping is nothing new. But suggesting that the president launch “a quick airstrike” to retrieve the downed drone is ridiculous, even for Cheney. There’s no such thing. Cheney has to know that any new U.S. incursion, following on the drone discovery, would sharply escalate tension with Iran, and to do that to recover a drone isn’t at all worth the risk.

It was left to CBS Early Show co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis this morning to ask the follow-up question Burnett did not: “Would not, though, an airstrike on Iran have potentially led us into a war with them?”  Cheney replied:

Well, if you look at what Iran has done over the years, they’ve been the prime backers of Hezbollah, of Hamas, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that cost us 241 American lives. These were Iranian-supported ventures. It’s not as though they haven’t already committed acts that some people would say come close to being acts of war.

For us to go in and take out the drone that crashed would have been, I think, a fairly simple operation, and it would have denied them the value of the intelligence they can collect by having that aircraft,” he said. “But the administrative basically limited itself to saying, ‘Please give it back,’ and the Iranians said no.

ThinkProgress made a good catch: When a U.S. spy plane ventured into Chinese airspace in April 2001 and crashed with a Chinese fighter jet, the Bush-Cheney administration wound up apologizing in order to get 11 soldiers released from Chinese custody.  They didn’t send in “a quick airstrike.”

For the record, Cheney sounded bullish on Newt Gingrich in 2012, though he hasn’t endorsed anyone formally. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” Cheney said, praising Gingrich’s political skills. “The thing I remember about Newt, we came to Congress together at the same time, ’78, and when Newt showed up, he said, ‘We can become the majority. We can take back the House of Representatives. We hadn’t had the House since the 1940s. And initially, none of us believed it, but he was persistent. And he was tenacious. He kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. And finally by ’94, he’s the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a Republican majority.” Cheney declined to describe the way Gingrich crashed and burned in the years that followed. You’ve got to count that among the nicest things anyone who’s worked with Gingrich has said about him during the whole campaign. Stay tuned.

That’s why the forum hosted Henry Kissinger, this big idea’s mascot. And that’s why the forum ended with an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a memoir to promote. Cheney was joined onstage by his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, who is devoting herself to whitewashing her father’s legacy of torture and death and shooting old men in the face.

They were technically being “interviewed” by a third party — a journalist! — but for some reason most of the question-asking was actually done by … Liz.

“Were you really secretly running things?” Liz Cheney asked.

“No,” her father said.

As proof, he cited the fact that President Bush once had Cheney’s dog banned from a section of Camp David.

This gentle interrogation seems to have struck certain high-profile Atlantic contributors as a bit silly but on the other hand it would be much harder to get big names to attend these things if they were worried someone might call them out for being a war criminal. (Hot tip for the International Criminal Court: Try sending out invitations for a sham “Ideas Festival”?)

The forum also hosted former Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf, an actual former dictator. (But one of the “good ones”!)

Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post’s nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn’t mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

Noticeably missing from the pages of Cheney’s memoir are references to books examining the big issues of our day — issues of crucial importance during his tenure with the Bush administration. From his memoir, it is impossible to know if he took any counsel at all from the estimable books of the past decade on national security, terrorism, torture, Islam, domestic surveillance. He remains opaque to the end.

This seems sort of like a defensible version of the weird criticism Troy leveled at President Obama, right? (As Troy wrote of Obama: “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”) So does Troy agree with the Post on Cheney? No. No, he does not:

When it comes to the books Cheney read as vice president, though, Cheney is indeed less forthcoming about the titles. He does, however, list a variety of thinkers and writers with whom he met while in office, including Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, David McCullough, Charles Krauthammer, and Victor Davis Hanson. In addition, while Cheney was vice president, there were public reports that Cheney read a number of books with contemporary policy implications, including Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, Elliott Cohen’s [sic] Supreme Command, and Winik’s April 1865 (interestingly, President Bush was reported to have read all three of those as well). I am sure that neither of these lists depicts the totality of what Cheney was reading and to whom he was speaking, so I guess by some measure he does remain “opaque.” But the list of at least some of the outside influences Cheney looked to during his vice presidency was available and out there, both within and outside Cheney’s memoir, if one had chosen to look for them.

He may not have been reading serious nonfiction about contemporary issues, but he met with Charles Krauthammer! That is basically the same thing, right? Reading an “estimable book” on Islam is surely a waste of time when you can just call up Victor Davis Hanson for a chat.

So for Cheney’s reading list we’ve got those all-important “meetings” plus two historical war books and one foreign policy manifesto that plainly reinforced Cheney’s already extant biases. I can see why self-proclaimed presidential reading expert Troy was “somewhat bothered” by that Post piece that made the same argument he made about Obama two weeks ago except not as stupidly.

Turns out this Troy character may not actually be a serious scholar of the history and meaning of presidential reading, and may, in fact, just be some random shameless right-wing think tank hack!

His radicalism is served proudly. “I wanted to make sure the governor understood my record was not moderate,” he writes about an early meeting with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The Cheney Regency featured a canny bureaucratic mandarin waging war in tandem with a passive chief executive, who shared his views but his not skills. There is nothing comparable in the history of the American presidency. Some sympathizers have discerned the hand of God in Bush’s presidency. Cheney, a less sentimental observer, gives more credit to himself.

Bush, his nominal boss, while occasionally lauded for his “courageous” decisions, cuts an unobtrusive and unimpressive figure in Cheney’s life. The first important political decision that Cheney attributes to Bush was selecting him as his vice-presidential running mate. “Dick, you’re the solution to my problem,” Cheney repeatedly quotes Bush as saying.

About Bush the man, Cheney has nothing to say. Nothing about his struggle with alcoholism, his troubled relationship with his father, his extensive record of two terms as governor of Texas, or his efforts to define a “compassionate conservatism.” Such irrelevant details do not interest Cheney who focuses relentlessly on power.

Chronologically, the next important decision that Cheney attributes to Bush came on Sept. ll as the White House confronted reports of hijacked airliners flying into buildings. The president, he writes, 

“approved my recommendation that they [Air Force pilots] be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been contacted and would not divert … When the president came on the line I told him about the shootdown order.”

This is a fib, if not a lie, as a careful reading of the 9/11 Commission report indicates. While the report’s language is tactful, senior commission staffers certainly had their doubts that Cheney ever spoke to Bush about the order before it was given. The evidence supports their doubts.

That pattern recurs in Cheney’s book: The chain of command appears to function normally while the vice president shapes crucial decisions. As the Bush White House pondered how to respond to the attacks in September 2001, for example, Cheney recalls offering sage advice: “I suggested to the president that it would be useful to make certain that [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld had assigned priority to planning for possible military action against Saddam.” Rumsfeld’s plans would be put into action in Iraq 18 months later.

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to Washington in 2002 to ask the White House to support a U.N. resolution against Saddam, Cheney disagreed — and assumed he had Bush’s assent. “I knew the president was no more interested than I was in an endless round of inspections and deception in Iraq,” he writes.

As the preparation for war intensified in the early 2003, Prince Bandar, the Saudi potentate, came to Washington skeptical that Washington was really going to invade Iraq. Cheney says he met with Bandar, who was reassured.

“I conveyed the message to the president. He met with Bandar the following Monday.” End of story. Bush’s conversation with Bandar has no importance in Cheney’s account — and perhaps in reality.

After the destruction of Saddam’s regime in March 2003 and Bush’s reelection, in 2004, Cheney felt so secure in his power he starts omitting Bush from his ambitions altogether. “I felt strongly that a major change was needed in the national security team,” Cheney writes. “Getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.”

It is safe to say that no vice president in American history has dared use such presumptuous language about the composition of a presidential cabinet. Cheney’s target Colin Powell soon resigned — though he claims he planned to all along.

About Iraq’s descent into violent chaos from 2003 to 2006, Cheney is mostly silent. Not surprisingly, he does not address the human toll: the awful civilian deaths or the massive displacement of Iraqi Christians, and the impoverishment of millions. He shrugs off the worldwide revulsion generated by the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. He offers occasional paeans to fallen U.S. soldiers, but more often he calls attention to his own influence in ways that seem condescending to his patron.

As the White House was forced by failure to consider a new policy in 2006, Cheney still tried to impose his will. When Bush’s aides prepared a presidential speech about the dismal situation in Iraq that did not include the word “victory,” Cheney proudly reveals that he intervened with the speechwriters — and literally put the talismanic word in the president’s mouth. Even Bush’s critics have stopped retailing such tart anecdotes about the former president. Cheney has not.

Not coincidentally, Bush broke with Cheney about this time. In November 2006, Bush fired Rumsfeld without asking for the vice president’s opinion. For the first time in five years, Bush started making key decisions on his own.

Cheney’s account turns petulant at this point. After 2006, no one in the Bush administration (besides Cheney) can do much good. The new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mistreated two top generals. Secretary of State Condi Rice was so eager to reach an agreement with North Korea she issued a public statement that was “utterly misleading.” And President Bush had failed by acting on her recommendations, not his.

“The process and the decision that followed seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded ways I had seen him make decisions in the past,” he writes with surprise.

What had changed was that Cheney no longer dominated the process of presidential decision-making on foreign policy. He was merely the vice president. His reign was over but his pride remained. Like the man or not, the possessiveness of his book’s title is deserved. From 2001 to 2006 was Dick Cheney’s time.