For president: Cheney of Wyoming
Having lost her seat in the House from Wyoming, Liz Cheney appears poised to run for president. A Republican, her goal will be to keep Donald Trump as far away from the White House as possible.
“Of course she doesn’t win [the nomination],” Bill Kristol, the neo-conservative, Never-Trumper, told Ronald Rosenstein of the Atlantic. But if she manages to force other Republicans “to come to grips” with Trump’s malignant influence on both the party and nation, she could impact the 2024 campaign and the course of U.S. politics for years into the future.
The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney (and formerly the third-ranking House Republican), Liz Cheney loathes Trump; she thinks the ex-real estate tycoon poses a unique threat. He’s the only president or presidential candidate in our long history to have denied the results of a fairly contested election. What’s worse, he’s persuaded millions of his fellows Americans to follow him into the abyss of denialism.
She’s dressed down Forever-Trumpers for their willful allegiance to the Big Lie – the Trumpian scheme to subvert what Lincoln called “the great tribunal of the American people.”
In conceding defeat on earlier Aug. 16, Cheney said, “As we leave here today, let us resolve to stand together – Republicans, Democrats and independents – against those who would destroy our Republic.”
The next morning Cheney told NBC News that yes, she was thinking about running for president. “I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” she said.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post wrote that “sometimes candidates run to try to shape the race… Sometimes winning isn’t everything.”
The Atlanta’s Rosenstein said, “There aren’t any clear examples of a candidate [for president] running a true kamikaze campaign.”
Maybe so, though there is the example of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas. Who? Douglas, the “Little Giant” of mid-19th century American politics, was the Northern Democratic choice for president on the eve of the Civil War in 1860.
Reading the political tea leaves that followed the Republican sweep in Pennsylvania in the October 1860 elections, Douglas told an aide, “Mr. Lincoln is the next president. We must save the Union. I will go South.”
South he went. Douglas, who was despised in Dixie almost as much as Lincoln, made campaign stops in Norfolk, Va., in Nashville and Jackson, Tenn., in Atlanta and Macon, Ga., and in Montgomery, Ala., all in an attempt to stem the tide of secession.
Historian Allan Nevins writes in volume two of his “The Emergence of Lincoln,” “Beginning his campaign as a battle for the presidency, [Douglas] shortly converted it into one for the Union…. Douglas, indomitable, indefatigable never so formidable as when meeting hopeless odds, turned to … the cause of national unity.”
(To further contemporize the 1860 election for president, Douglas’ actions were premised, Nevins writes, on a credible rumor of a Southern plot to seize the government soon after Lincoln’s election. The plot involved declaring Lincoln-Douglas rival John C. Breckinridge the president-elect on the strength of his carrying the South along with the “border” states of Virginia and Maryland. The “radicals” running the show from inside the Buchanan administration would then call on the Southern states to recognize the “de facto [Breckinridge] government,” thus completing the coup.)
Sorry for this dive into history. It may seem a distraction. Here’s the thing: What’s past is prologue. Again, Nevins: “Where were the leaders equal to the crisis [of 1856-60] – leaders who united intellectual power, moderating temper, moral earnestness, and the power of uplifting the popular heart?”
In puzzling over the politics that eventually installed Lincoln in the White House, Nevins raises “three essential” qualifications for the office of president that are as relevant today as they were in that bygone era.
The first two are a “grasp” of “fundamental realities,” plus “tact and courage” in support of “principles.”
The final qualification is the ability to “appeal to the nation’s imagination, its idealism, and its sense of a great historic mission.”
Liz Cheney, have at it.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.