Liz Cheney: A new face for the GOP

last updated 8 January 2015

“If you miss the old bomb-and-torture style of conservatism,” said Gabriel Winant in Salon.com, “Liz Cheney’s here to help.” Cheney, the 43-year-old daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, just announced the creation of a new conservative group—Keep America Safe—devoted to the simple proposition that President Obama should stop raising the white flag of surrender to terrorists. A former State Department official, Cheney has lately become a fixture on cable television, where she can be found lambasting the current administration and vigorously defending her father’s three-part strategy for dealing with Islamic radicalism: “Detention, torture, and bombing.” Having attracted a coterie of neoconservatives, including Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, to her new group, it’s clear that Cheney intends to turn her dad’s grudge against Obama into a real crusade.

Someone has to warn Americans about Obama’s spineless stance on terrorism, said Jennifer Rubin in CommentaryMagazine.com. And Cheney comes from good fighting stock. “We are a nation at war,” her group’s mission statement asserts—a useful reminder at a time when our president is more interested in winning peace prizes from Europeans than in defending Americans. Cheney is smart and capable of articulating the dire consequences should Obama succeed in “repudiating American exceptionalism, soft-pedaling American values, and denigrating the necessity of American military might.” Naturally, Cheney’s Keep America Safe will be “a platform not only for a conservative perspective on national security but also for Cheney herself.” A Senate campaign in Virginia may serve as her entry point into national politics.

If Democrats scoff at the prospect of another Cheney, said Michelle Cottle in TheNewRepublic.com, it will be at their own peril. I’ve watched this “baby-faced blonde” fighting for her “daddy’s honor” on TV talk shows, and she makes mincemeat of the men across the table. Let’s face it: “Liz Cheney is a particularly dangerous combination of sweet-as-sugar looks and savage instincts.” Men in particular “must take care not to come across as bullying their fairer opponents,” but if they go easy on her, they’ll “wind up stuck in the undercarriage of her SUV.” You can see why Cheney’s been dubbed a “red state rock star,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. In a party that’s had its troubles attracting female voters, she’s a fresh and intelligent new voice—one that can help put to rest “any thought that Sarah Palin is the female face of the party.”