He served as acting president for two hours and 15 minutes about a week ago, when President Bush was under heavy sedation during a Camp David colonoscopy. He has raised more than $11 million for Republican candidates and party activities in the first half of this year alone. His whereabouts have frequently been kept secret, heightening his sense of indispensability within the Bush administration. Dick Cheney is a different kind of vice president.

Daniel Webster turned down the position in 1828, saying that he didn’t want to be buried until he was dead. Walter F. Mondale described the job as being “fire hydrant of the nation.” Mondale shouldn’t have been surprised; his mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey, liked to tell the old story about the mother who had two sons: One went to sea, the other became vice president. Neither was ever heard from again. And Al Gore loved to quote Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson and who said being vice president was like being a man in a cataleptic state: You can’t speak, you can’t move, you suffer no pain, and yet you are perfectly conscious of everything that is going around you.

But the vice presidency suits Cheney, raising the question of whether the former White House chief of staff and onetime member of the House Republican leadership might be pioneering a new role and thus becoming a new model for the vice presidency.

Cheney is the elder statesman of the Bush administration, known for his judgment and respected for his cool approach to crisis. He is no Clark Clifford, the Missouri lawyer who liked to be regarded as the counsel to presidents but who was brought into the inner circle only for specific tasks. Cheney is there all the time. Indeed, all of Washington noted that Cheney’s tenure as acting president began at 7:09 on a Saturday morning and that he was at his post at that hour, receiving an intelligence briefing and presiding over staff meetings. The rest of the capital power establishment was asleep, in line for bagels or cutting up oranges for the soccer team.

The key to Cheney’s profile in the administration is the certainty that the former Wyoming lawmaker isn’t seeking the presidency himself. Webster lusted after the White House, and though John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ascended to the presidency after terms as vice president, Webster believed that by end of the first quarter of the 19th century the likelihood of moving up was small. (Though Martin Van Buren moved directly from being vice president to president in 1837, no man repeated the feat until President Bush’s father was elected in 1988.) Humphrey, Mondale and Gore always wanted to be president and it was their ambition that helped to thwart their vice presidencies.

Until now, presidential nominees have used the vice presidency as a lure to power-seekers and as a balance to their own attributes. John F. Kennedy knew he needed a Dixie anchor. But the Kennedy forces were so worried that Lyndon B. Johnson might seek to expand the role of the vice presidency that Robert F. Kennedy was dispatched to Johnson’s Biltmore suite to remind the Texan he would have no independence and little latitude as vice president. Johnson nodded his assent, but didn’t believe it. When one of his friends remarked that LBJ would have less power as vice president than as Senate majority leader, Johnson argued, “Power is where power goes.”

Johnson was alternately bored and angry, and almost always frustrated, as vice president. But when he became president and won his own term in 1964, he repeated the same pattern, choosing an energetic, compelling figure from the Senate, Humphrey of Minnesota. Johnson humbled and humiliated him, eventually rendering one of the heroes of 20th-century liberalism so powerless that he became a symbol of ridicule.

Cheney’s lack of presidential ambition frees him from frustration and frees the president to use him widely. When Gore went on a fund-raising spree that got him into legal trouble, the motivation was obvious. He was collecting the political chits that would help him lay the groundwork for his own presidential campaign. In modern times, that road had been pioneered by Richard M. Nixon, an ambitious freshman senator from California plucked for the vice presidency by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, and there wasn’t a Lincoln Day Dinner in a corner of the country too remote for Nixon. It gave him the 1960 nomination even though Eisenhower said it would take him a week to think of an administration initiative that bore Nixon’s fingerprints.

Now Cheney can bounce from Evansville, Ind. (raising an estimated $200,000 for Rep. John Hostettler), to Fayetteville, Ark. (raking in $190,000 for Sen. Tim Hutchinson), to Lower Paxton Township, Pa. (boosting Rep. George W. Gekas’ war chest by $200,000), without anyone thinking that Cheney is thinking about convention delegates. He’s not. He can also tell the president what he thinks. He may be the first vice president who has made the job work for himself and for the president he serves. He’s the first vice president who regards the job as an end in itself. As such, he may not be the last.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.