She’s making a big bet that what’s unpopular in her party today will make her more formidable in the future.
In the last year of the George W. Bush presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney caused a stir when an interviewer reminded him that two-thirds of the country believed the administration’s war in Iraq was no longer worth fighting.
“So?” Cheney replied.
Interviewer Martha Raddatz of ABC News seemed incredulous: “So … you don’t care what the American people think?”
“No,” Cheney replied, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”
The exchange echoed for days as a window into what critics regarded as Cheney’s breathtaking arrogance, which was widely perceived as a primary engine behind the administration’s plunge into a war that had lasted far longer — and was far more costly — than anything Bush had prepared the country for at its outset five years earlier.
The Cheney-Raddatz exchange springs to mind now, 13 years later, as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has given the family probably its most favorable mainstream media coverage in three decades — back to the days when Dick Cheney was widely portrayed as the steady, understated, Defense secretary of the first Gulf War, rather than the sinister vice president scheming in the shadows of the second Gulf War.
If the Washington news media thinks the Cheneys are doing right by standing up to Donald Trump over his role in the Capitol insurrection, father and daughter surely must wonder privately if they are somehow doing wrong.
What’s notable, though, is that Liz Cheney has shed her old reputation for living off her father’s name and ideas, and vaulted into her new status — brave truth-teller in a party dominated by craven Trump enablers — mainly by drawing on a family legacy: indifference to dissenting opinion.
Liz Cheney surely knew there would be fierce backlash from within the House Republican caucus, where she is third-ranking leader, over her criticism of Trump and vote to impeach him. Her response, in essence, was: So?
What looks arrogant and even contemptuous in one light looks principled and conscientious in another. Her move raises the question of whether paying a near-term cost — in challenges to her leadership position and vitriol from Trump partisans — can pay a long-term dividend in enhanced national stature.
It may be too early to get carried away. There’s still some time for Liz Cheney to squirm out of a courageous position into something more like the groveling accommodation practiced by other Republicans who share her disdain for Trump but are afraid of him. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose milder criticism of Trump left him less exposed, has already started a climbdown.
But as long as Liz Cheney keeps her nerve, she will be one of the more interesting people in contemporary politics, as Republicans chart their future in the wake of the Trump presidency. She offers a case study in a subject that interests both her father and Donald Trump: the psychological dimensions of leadership.
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Liz Cheney is making a big bet that what’s unpopular in her party today will make her more formidable in the future https://t.co/vkAjfZqSr1
— POLITICO (@politico) January 28, 2021
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