FILL: Mr. Vice President, picking up on that, you both just sang the praises of the tops of your ticket. Without mentioning them by name at all, explain to us why you are different from your opponent, starting with you, Mr. Vice President.
CHENEY: Why I am different from John Edwards. Well, in some respects, I think, probably there are more similarities than there are differences in our personal story.
It seems like this is being interpreted as "without mentioning [your presidential candidate] by name", but my natural reading of this is "without mentioning [your opponent] by name". This puts Cheney's response in context: immediately following what could be interpreted as a direct instruction not to mention his opponent by name, that's the first thing that he does.
Of course, none of this affects the fact that it's a completely dumb question. What is this, Vice Presidential Party Games? Defend your foreign policy without deviation, hesitation or repetition (actually, that would have been a refreshing change from the rather boring rehashing of the same old arguments over Iraq). There's a lot of discussion about who was "the winner" of the debate, but to me it's pretty clear that the moderator was the loser.
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