NEW YORK, Sept 1 (AFP) - Four years after being hailed as President George W. Bush's steady right hand, Vice President Dick Cheney is stumping for their re-election with his popularity at a new low and his political value in question.
The darling of the party's right wing was to take the stage at the Republican National Convention Wednesday to accept the nomination for another four-year term at Bush's side.
The 63-year-old Cheney, an architect of the administration's tough, pre-emptive assault on terror, was expected to vigorously defend the decision to invade Iraq last year.
The man Democrats call Bush's "attack-dog-in-chief" was also certain to deliver new broadsides against presidential challenger John Kerry, portraying him as an irresolute wimp unfit to command the country in perilous times.
But while still drawing raves from conservatives, Cheney is going into the November 2 election with as many political minuses as pluses for Bush in the closely fought contest for the White House.
A Gallup poll published Wednesday showed Cheney's popularity rating dropping to a new low at 44 percent, compared with 67 percent after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
Appreciation for the veteran Washington insider predictably breaks down according to party lines: 79 percent of Republicans are for him; 79 percent of Democrats are against him.
More significantly, independents tend to have a negative view of Cheney (51 percent to 36 percent), the Gallup survey showed. His youthful vice presidential rival, John Edwards, leads him 52 percent to 42 percent overall in a head-to-head matchup.
While Cheney has been hailed by some as the most influential vice president in US history, the Gallup findings cast doubt on whether Bush and the country have been the better for it.
Forty-one percent of Americans said Cheney had "generally given good advice that has helped the administration," while 39 percent felt he had "generally given bad advice that has created problems for the administration."
Cheney, a gray, bespectacled and secretive figure who often bunks down in an "undisclosed location" for security purposes, relishes his behind-the-scenes role in the Bush administration.
"Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually," Cheney said in a rare interview with American newspapers in January.
But the former defense secretary and congressman from the western state of Wyoming has been accumulating heaps of unwanted political baggage since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.
Cheney brushes off the failure of US troops to find the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war. He still insists Saddam had links to Al-Qaeda terrorists, even if Bush himself has played down direct ties.
Halliburton, an oil services company Cheney headed before becoming vice president, has been embroiled in a series of investigations of lucrative army contracts won for the supply of services in Iraq.
His decision to keep secret a list of people with whom he consulted in the spring of 2001, while working on the administration's energy policy, was the subject of a complaint argued unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court.
In June, the usually smooth vice president lost his cool and disregarded congressional decorum by firing a four-letter expletive at a Democratic senator.
Cheney, who has a gay daughter, has even come under fire from conservative groups for his public coolness to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He says the matter should be left to the individual states.
But analysts say it is an open question whether the controversies surrounding Cheney could have a major impact in November.
"It's unclear whether the vice presidential candidates will have a hugely significant impact in this election, or if vice presidents have ever had a major impact on an election," said Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief.