Nature abhors a vacuum, the philosopher Spinoza wrote. So does politics.

And in politics, there is no vacuum like the leadership of a defeated party.

In recent weeks, the Obama White House, with malice aforethought, has tried to help the Republicans fill that vacuum by targeting talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

In doing so, they’ve been helped both by the predictable lack of any clear GOP voice and by the way Limbaugh and Cheney sought the headlines with outspoken denunciations of Barack Obama and his team.

Limbaugh’s effort to seek the spotlight is nothing new; that’s his business. But Cheney’s effort to keep a high profile is unusual in that the top figures of a departing administration usually leave the spotlight to their successors.

Indeed, George W. Bush invoked that tradition Tuesday in his first post-presidential appearance, declaring it’s time for an ex-president “to tap dance off the stage” and let his successor “have a go at solving the world’s problems.” Obama, Bush said, “deserves my silence.”

Some of his closest associates don’t feel similarly bound.

Obama had been in office for just two weeks when Andy Card, the normally restrained former chief of staff, was griping about a photo showing the new president without coat and tie in the Oval Office. There ought to be “a dress code that respects the office of the president,” Card told the syndicated show, “Late Edition.”

Cheney and former top political strategist Karl Rove weighed in with more substantive criticism, at the risk of looking, among other things, hypocritical.

Rove regularly bashes Obama in his weekly Wall Street Journal column. Cheney went on CNN’s “State of the Union” last Sunday and assailed the new president’s handling of issues from the economy to the qualifications of the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Not only does veteran diplomat Chris Hill lack experience in the region, Cheney said, but he has “none of the skills and talents” of his predecessor.

And Cheney said the new administration is “using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government and much more authority for the government over the private sector.” Interesting accusations from a top figure in an administration that picked the hapless Michael Brown to direct disaster relief, created a massive new entitlement for prescription drug coverage and presided over a vast increase in spending, something he defended as “appropriate” because of the terrorist threat.

Meanwhile, Rove has accused the new administration of “winging it” on issues from its economic program to Guantanamo Bay and of breaking campaign promises from tax cuts for middle-class Americans to reducing budget earmarks.

On Obama’s ninth day in office, Rove assailed how the new president organized his staff, including giving his “director of political affairs” a White House office. That was a strange charge from someone who was both Bush’s chief political strategist and a top policy adviser.

In general, their basic complaint seems to be that Obama has unwisely changed their policies.

But they’re also trying to justify their tenure, including Cheney’s effort to disclaim responsibility for the current economic woes.

“This isn’t something that happened just in the Bush administration or just in the United States,” he said, adding that it wasn’t right to say, “George Bush was president, and that is why everything is screwed up.” By changing Bush administration practices, including banning torture, Obama had made the United States “less safe,” Cheney said.

Those comments prompted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to respond at his daily briefing Monday, “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal,” linking two critics far less popular outside the GOP base than within it.

Indeed, not only does the Cheney-Rove criticism revive questions about their own shortcomings, it makes one wonder how pleased current GOP leaders are by the refusal of top Bush figures to leave the political stage.

After all, many Republicans blame Bush and his advisers for their party losing both houses of Congress and the White House in back-to-back elections.

Even a leadership vacuum might be preferable to a reminder of that.

— Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.