Liz Cheney at the Little America Hotel and Resort in Cheyenne, Wyoming on July 17, 2013. (2013 Getty Images)
OK, she’s out. Liz Cheney is no longer in the race. Now, can we leave her alone? My god, I can’t remember somebody getting spanked so hard for not even being bad. Liz Cheney is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton, no? You have to at least admit that the disparate media reaction has been painful to watch, if not extremely unfair and unnecessary.
One woman says she doesn’t want to run for office. She’s begged, pleaded with and hailed a hero. The other runs for a Senate seat in Wyoming, where her father was a U.S. representative. She’s hounded and pilloried. Does that seem fair?
Critics charged that she hadn’t lived there long enough or held down a job. It’s funny how the same wasn’t pressed as virulently when Hillary Clinton (whose dad was not a N.Y. congressman) ran for U.S. senate from New York in 2000.
In case you missed it, here’s Liz Cheney’s exit statement:
“Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign. My children and their futures were the motivation for our campaign and their health and well-being will always be my overriding priority.”
Fact is Liz Cheney never stood a chance. Could she take on and even take down Sen. Mike Enzi, (R-Wyo)? Absolutely!
Her chances of pulling that off were quite good. Where she didn’t stand a chance was with the media, who seemed obsessed with even her decision to run.
The attacks were sudden, if not somewhat predictable, beginning with the big question. Convenience can make the media do funny things, like when they fall in love with a member of a party they usually deplore.
The attacks went something like this: “How dare you take on a popular and well-respected Republican like Mike Enzi?”
Right!
Enzi played right into it, allowing himself to be portrayed as a poor defenseless victim.
His quote in the Washington Post seemed as if it was delivered with a tear rolling down his cheek; “I thought we were friends.”
Right!
The next flurry of attacks centered on her admissibility to represent Wyoming. Critics charged that she hadn’t lived there long enough or held down a job. It’s funny how the same wasn’t pressed as virulently when Hillary Clinton (whose dad was not a N.Y. congressman) ran for U.S. senate from New York in 2000. In fact, the conventional wisdom is that the carpetbagger label didn’t stick to Clinton because New York, unlike Wyoming, is a big and sophisticated place where politics is not retail.
Right!
Then there’s the gay thing. If ever in America has the word gay been a magnet for publicity, it’s here and it’s now. What was essentially a family spat became a national political and media brouhaha when Cheney said on Fox News Sunday that she believed “in the traditional definition of marriage.” Her sister Mary and her wife Heather Poe took offense, because Cheney had told them at their wedding “how happy she was for them.”
The media spin? Cheney was a hypocrite.
Right!
So now that she’s out, let’s go ahead and say it. The media subterfuge of reporting early, often and negatively on Liz, because they really didn’t like the Cheney who wasn’t running — it worked.
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