IOUX CITY, Iowa, June 25 - Vice President Dick Cheney, long portrayed by his aides as unperturbed by partisan attacks, admitted Friday that he “probably” cursed at a senior Democratic senator this week, said he did not regret it and added that he “felt better afterwards.”
Then Mr. Cheney quickly reverted to type, flying here for a tightly scripted campaign rally where he never mentioned the incident in a speech on terrorism and the economy to an adoring Republican crowd.
The revelation, if that is what it was, that Mr. Cheney is comfortable with the use of four-letter words and is willing to direct them at political opponents, was the latest in a string of developments over the past few weeks that have put the vice president squarely in the spotlight. And as he takes on a higher political profile, it is hard to tell who is happier, Republicans or Democrats.
At the rally here, Mr. Cheney was immediately forgiven by some members of the invited crowd for swearing at Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont on the Senate floor on Tuesday. It showed him, they said, to be a real person who is forceful in the face of unwarranted criticism.
“It tells me Cheney is very human,” said Dennis Lumphrey, a hospital worker from Moville, Iowa, who was in the crowd. “It also tells me he’s not going to get pushed around. He’ll fight back. A lot of people around the world want to tell America what to do. We need to have our own direction and priorities.”
President Bush’s political aides said they anticipated no negative aftereffects. In fact, the White House announced that Mr. Cheney’s campaign schedule would only intensify. Next weekend, he will take a bus tour through Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And senior Republicans said he had proved himself a voice of wisdom and reassurance to voters on the two big topics of the race, the economy and the fight against terrorism.
“He’s a tremendous asset to the Republican party,” said Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “The rank-and-file Republican voters out there just love Dick Cheney. They appreciate his loyalty to the president, and they appreciate that he feels solid.”
But Mr. Cheney has been drawing even more partisan fire than usual over the last few weeks. His aggressive defense of the administration’s assertions that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda intensified the long-running partisan and ideological clash over whether he helped lead the nation to war under false pretenses.
He won a short-term legal victory when the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a lower court had acted “prematurely” when it rejected his request to block disclosure of records from his energy policy task force. But the ruling brought the issue to the fore again, allowing Democrats to renew their attacks that he has sought to work behind closed doors to further the interests of energy companies.
Now more than ever, his opponents call Mr. Cheney among the most polarizing figures in politics. Democrats portray him as the power behind the throne and the personification of militarism, corporate corruption and government secrecy.
“We’ve got to get the White House back from a man who has abused his power as the leader of the free world,” the comedian Billy Crystal told the crowd at a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Thursday night. “Dick Cheney has got to go.”
Mr. Bush’s Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, regularly repeats Mr. Cheney’s name in much the same way Republicans have long used that of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton- as a symbol of all that is wrong with the policies and personalities of the opposing party.
“Cheney’s definitely turned into a big, fat albatross around the president’s neck,” said Jim Jordan, Mr. Kerry’s former campaign manager.
“His public image is very bad and getting worse,” Mr. Jordan said. Mr. Cheney’s aides and supporters said one of his great strengths as a campaigner was his ability to remain stoic about the way he is portrayed by Democrats and immune from the pressures of responding to the ups and downs of daily news cycles.
But the exchange with Mr. Leahy on Tuesday suggested that Democrats manage to get under Mr. Cheney’s skin.
Interviewed by Fox News on Friday after a speech in Saginaw, Mich., Mr. Cheney did not specifically acknowledge using the expletive that he has been widely reported to have used. “Well, I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it,” Mr. Cheney said. Asked whether he was angry about Mr. Leahy’s suggestions that the Halliburton Company had received no-bid contracts in Iraq because Mr. Cheney ran the company before joining the Republican ticket four years ago, the vice president said that was part of it.
“Also, it had to do with - he is the kind of individual who will make those kinds of charges and then come after you as though he’s your best friend,” Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Leahy’s aides said the incident occurred when Mr. Cheney gathered with members of the Senate for a formal portrait on the Senate floor on Tuesday. Mr. Leahy was chatting with Republicans, they said, when he spied Mr. Cheney and approached him. When Mr. Cheney turned away, Mr. Leahy, the aides said, joked that the vice president was unwilling to talk to Democrats.
After Mr. Cheney expressed his “dissatisfaction” with Mr. Leahy, as the vice president put it to Fox News, Mr. Leahy “told Mr. Cheney that he and Senate Democrats didn’t appreciate being called anti-Catholic,” said David Carle, Mr. Leahy’s spokesman. Mr. Leahy was referring to Republican accusations that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were “anti-Catholic” because they refused to confirm a judicial nominee, William H. Pryor Jr., who opposed abortion. Mr. Leahy is the senior Democrat on the panel.
Then Mr. Cheney stalked off, Mr. Leahy’s aides said, using an obscene phrase to describe what he thought Mr. Leahy should do.
In a statement issued after Fox News broadcast its interview with Mr. Cheney, Mr. Carle said, “It appears the vice president’s previous calls for civility are now inoperative.”
By forcing Mr. Cheney to address his personal conduct, the incident brought a rare moment of improvisation to the vice president’s campaign, which has so far been a highly orchestrated affair directed primarily at raising money and rousing the Republican faithful.
Mr. Cheney does not do rapid response, the daily back and forth between the campaigns, and he rarely addresses issues like education or Mr. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda. He plays the traditional vice-presidential role of attacking the opposition, but his stump speech parrots the same lines about Mr. Kerry that Mr. Bush uses in his speeches.
Mr. Cheney’s strength, his aides and supporters said, is in setting out what the stakes are in the election.
“We’ll have him do what he does best and has done best, which is to take the needed step back to provide perspective about the challenges we face and the policies we need,” said Mary Matalin, a former senior aide to Mr. Cheney who will join him on the campaign trail this summer. “He’s a political reality zone.”
To soften up Mr. Cheney’s somewhat wooden public persona, he is often introduced, as he was here, by his wife, Lynne Cheney. She told a story about how she wore a strapless red dress made by her grandmother on her first date with Mr. Cheney and how she credited the dress with their having a second date.
Republican strategists said Mr. Cheney, a former House member, takes a keen interest in the nuts and bolts of electoral politics.
“He has a very well developed sense of campaign strategy and campaign tactics,” said one prominent Republican in Washington who has close ties to Mr. Cheney. “He understands how to read a poll and the cross tabs. He’ll delve into message and the things that inform campaign decisions. But he’s less likely to involve himself in detail than to try to spark people’s thinking or challenge people’s thinking.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting for this article.
