On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was elected to her father’s old seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Three years ago, Cheney attempted to challenge Sen. Michael B. Enzi in the Republican state primary, but was stiffly rebuffed as a carpetbagger and dropped out of the race under pretext of ill health in the family. “It’s a unique strategy to live your entire life elsewhere and then come to a state a year before you’re going to announce you’re going to run for that state’s highest office,” U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, remarked in a reference to Cheney’s long residency in Virginia, where she lived before and after working for the State Department during the Bush years. This time, as a candidate for the seat Lummis had decided to vacate, Cheney prevailed after raising two million dollars, 15-times more money than her closest competitor in the race, despite continued complaints of carpetbaggery. “The donor list on Cheney’s FEC report,” rollcall.com noted, “reads like a who’s who of the Bush-Cheney White House,” including Donald Rumsfeld, Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove, Stephen J. Hadley, Trent Lott, and Pete Sessions. Her father, despite being a caricature of the establishment Republican politician Donald Trump spent the past year and a half lambasting, declared his support for Trump (who won Wyoming by a landslide last November), while Liz covered herself on the opposite flank by declaring that she disagrees with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.
Everyone, in Wyoming and elsewhere, assumes that Liz Cheney has higher political ambitions, starting with Senator Enzi’s seat when he retires (Mr. Enzi is 72 years old) and ending perhaps by breaking the glass ceiling Mrs. Clinton failed to shatter and making America supreme again by reassembling the Grand Old Team to reinstate the National Greatness policies devised by her father, his old boss in the White House, Messrs. Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfo witz, Kristol, and the rest of them; President Trump having squandered American prestige and discredited the notion of American indispensability by renouncing nation-building, rescuing American troops from foreign hellholes, and telling the world to look after itself.
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