The subjects today are Dick Cheney and job security, why he has it, who wants to disrupt it, and why you ought to ignore most of what you read about it.

On the surface, the vice president is in big trouble. A Time magazine poll taken this month shows that more than a third of registered voters believe Cheney should be replaced on the Republican ticket. The same poll shows that a majority of Americans believe Cheney’s past role as CEO of Halliburton makes them view him less favorably. A New York Times/CBS News poll shows that the vice president was viewed favorably by only 28 percent of adults and unfavorably by 37 percent — an increase in the unfavorable figure of nine points in a month. These numbers suggest the veep is in deep peril.

But not so fast. Remember that, in politics as in love and oil drilling, it’s not what’s on the surface that matters. It’s what’s below the surface that counts.

Sure, a lot of people think President Bush should dump Cheney from the Republican ticket. Most of those people are Democrats. They don’t have a voice in internal GOP affairs. Their motives in matters such as these are not exactly pure.

There are many reasons why Cheney won’t be removed from the Republican ticket. One of them is that Republicans really like the guy. Three out of four of them believe he should remain right where he is. They know he is a terrific fund-raiser. They know he can rouse the Republican right. They know that no one, with the possible exception of the president himself, irritates Democrats quite so much as Cheney. From the Republicans’ point of view, that alone justifies keeping the fellow around.

(One measure of Cheney’s role in the Democratic demonization game is the release this summer of a book whose title warrants notice. It’s the “I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice … Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal’s War on America.” Getting top billing on a volume like that takes some doing.)

Of course, the big reason that Cheney isn’t going anywhere but to the dais to accept the Republican vice presidential nomination is that Bush wants him there. The Democrats have lots of theories; they can be distilled down to this, a role that Karl Rove used to play: Cheney’s really the brains behind the operation. (A measure of the intensity of this notion is the title of yet another new book, this one to hit the stands in September. It’s a “highly unauthorized biography” called “Dick: The Man Who Is President” by John Nichols.)

The more the Democrats kick, pick at, slug and defame Cheney, the higher his stock rises in the White House. The thinking in Republican circles goes like this: All the Democratic carping shows just how valuable Cheney is.

Indeed, nothing so worries Republican insiders as the fear that Cheney might peel away, or be peeled from, the ticket this fall. Walk through any likely scenario and you’ll see why. Even with the most benign case — a medical recommendation that a man who has suffered four heart attacks shouldn’t serve two terms — the airwaves would be full of speculation: What’s the real reason he’s gone? Who decided? How was he told? What does it mean? Is this a desperate move?

Plus (and you can hear Jay Leno asking this one the next night): Does the president know?

But jokes aside, the president does know. He knows that Cheney is an invaluable partner, the only person in his circle (with the obvious exception of Laura Bush) who harbors no ambitions of his own. He wants what’s best for the president and the country, and though his critics will debate which one of those comes first, Bush — quite fairly from his point of view — believes they are the same thing.

But the interesting thing about the faux controversy around the vice president is the names of the people who might replace Cheney. They are former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. They’re all moderates. They’re the Republicans that the Democrats find most palatable. They’re inconceivable as a running mate for a president who is himself — and this is a thought that the president’s opponents refuse to process — part of the religious right.

Bush doesn’t make special efforts to appeal to the right. He lives there. Giuliani, Pataki and McCain are getting prominent roles at the Republican National Convention in New York. Religious conservatives aren’t going to tolerate giving them any more than that.

Republicans love Dick Cheney. They love the way he throws red meat to the masses in the red states. They love the way he sets the Democrats’ teeth on edge. They love the way he adds a sense of gravity to the GOP ticket. They love the way he speaks of “the failed thinking of the past,” a phrase that gives liberals fits. They love the way he has begun to talk about “lawsuit abuse”; it’s a signal that Cheney is planning a full assault on his opponent, former trial lawyer John Edwards. Last week, in Minnesota, they even held signs saying “Too Cool.” These signs, which were not referring to the temperatures in International Falls in February, represent a triumph of politics over physics for a man not ordinarily regarded as cool — or, for that matter, as particularly warm.

They love all that. But there is one thing about Dick Cheney that leaves them slightly unsettled. Keeping the vice president on the ticket keeps the Republican race for 2008 wide open. The Democrats already have a front-runner should Kerry falter in November. It’s Sen. Edwards of North Carolina, the trial lawyer whose first national campaign is but a trial run for his own sometime in the future. The Republicans have nobody. They’ve chosen to worry about that later. But in American politics, later has a way of coming around sooner.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.