ROME – Vice President Dick Cheney, not surprisingly, endorsed Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate to replace him, but the man who reshaped the office as much as other vice president in history suggested she would not necessarily replicate the role he has played under President Bush.

“Each administration is different,” he said, speaking to reporters on Monday on the sun-dappled patio of the ambassador’s residence here. “And there’s no reason why Sarah Palin can’t be a successful vice president in a McCain administration.”

Mr. Cheney’s remarks represented his first on Senator McCain’s choice as a running mate and offered insight into his own legacy in office. Put simply, the world’s not likely to see a vice presidency quite like his.

“It won’t look exactly like the Bush administration or the first Bush administration, the Ford administration,” he said. “It’ll be relatively unique to this president and this time that they’re in office.”

Even as Republicans gathered for their convention, Mr. Cheney travelled to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and, now, Italy to rally international pressure on Russia over its war against Georgia. He brought to the trip a reservoir of experiences as an energy executive, a defense official and a hawkish skeptic of Russia that predated his two terms as vice president.

If it might be hard for her critics to imagine Ms. Palin emerging from Air Force Two in Georgia or Ukraine to hector Russia, as Mr. Cheney did, that’s beside the point, in his view. A Palin vice presidency, he said, would be shaped by her own experiences and her partnership with a President McCain. Much of that, of course, remains unclear.



“We’ve had all kinds of vice presidents over the years,” Mr. Cheney said, when asked about how her experience differed so vastly from his. “Everybody brings a different set of experiences to the office and also a different kind of understanding with whoever the president is.”

Mr. Cheney, who has met the governor before and telephoned her after she was selected, described her speech to the Republican convention as “superb.” He singled out her joke about the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom.

“I loved some of her lines,” he said, laughing.

Mr. Cheney skipped his scheduled appearance before his party’s convention because of Hurricane Gustav, but he watched her speech on television early Thursday morning in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, 10 time zones away.