Liz Cheney Sees Herself in Winston Churchill
Liz Cheney compared herself to "Winston Churchill standing up to [Adolf] Hitler" on Tuesday night when declaring her opposition to American airstrikes in Syria — the latest in a series of Liz-Cheney-thinking-rather-highly-of-Liz-Cheney moments.
.Liz Cheney compared herself to "Winston Churchill standing up to [Adolf] Hitler" on Tuesday night when declaring her opposition to American airstrikes in Syria — the latest in a series of Liz-Cheney-thinking-rather-highly-of-Liz-Cheney moments. She was speaking to about 150 Tea Party members when she rejected President Obama's call to strike Syria, calling his national security policy "amateurish." It seems Obama is Hitler in this scenario. We might note that more often, Obama has been compared to another British politician, Neville Chamberlain, who appeased Hitler.
However, you might not want to trust these reports, as they come from a newspaper that Cheney thinks deserves to die. She railed against the Jackson Hole News & Guide during her talk: "We have media outlets in the valley that are not fair and balanced." Per a reporter at the Guide who was in the audience:
She blamed the newspaper’s editor. “His name is Angus,” Cheney said. Editor Angus Thuermer Jr. wrote an article last week about Cheney posting a $220 bond for the “high misdemeanor” of swearing a false oath to obtain a Wyoming resident fishing license.
In addition to her foreign policy instincts, Cheney puts a lot of faith in her news instincts. She suggested that voters would be better off to turn to her own campaign as a trusted source in news, and not the local paper. Cheney urged members of the crowd to tell 10 friends about her campaign rather than read the newspaper. "Newspapers are dying, and that’s not a bad thing," she said. "We’re not depending on the Jackson Hole News & Guide to get the news out. We’re depending on ourselves. We’re going to go over their heads."
It seems Cheney was aware that a Guide reporter was in the audience, but she wasn't bothered.
Cheney also puts a lot of stock in her in her own judgment of other people's marriages. Earlier this week, Cheney came out against gay marriage — which also means she came out against her own sister's marriage. (Mary Cheney responded that Liz was "dead wrong.")
Finally, Cheney seems to have a lot of faith in her own political instincts. That's obvious in her decision to run for Senate in Wyoming in the first place. That's not because she's challenging an incumbent Republican. It's because she's challenging an incumbent Republican in a state where she's spent very little of her life. As Alex Roarty explains in National Journal, Cheney could have taken one for the team and run against Democratic Sen. Mark Warner in her adopted state of Virginia. Republicans haven't been able to field a good challenger there, and she could have at least made Warner work for a second term. Instead, she's running a race she thinks she can win in Wyoming. Unfortunately for Cheney, Sen. Mike Enzi's leading her 55 percent to 21 percent in a recent poll. And that's another personal relationship she's let take a hit for the sake of her career. After she announced her candidacy, Enzi said, "I thought we were friends."
And according to Joe Hagan's 2010 profile of the Cheneys for New York, Liz's end goal might be the White House. He writes:
As early as the 2000 election, Liz was being told by Bush and Cheney advisers like Stuart Stevens that she could be president one day. She laughed it off, but starting last summer, she seemed to draft an informal outline of her future. On an appearance on Fox News in late May, she recalled the coalition that Ronald Reagan built in the late seventies, roping together the Republicans, independents, and centrist Democrats, the “three prongs of the stool he was able to put together as a majority.” With Obama in office, she declared, “it will become possible for us again to build that kind of coalition,” implicitly marking Obama as another Carter.
Well, Obama got elected for a second term, and, for now, it looks unlikely Liz Cheney will ever be president. But that won't stop her from thinking she could be. She's Liz Cheney.