Why the Wyoming Senate race is like nothing you’ve seen before

It means nothing for control of the Senate. It means everything to the complex web of colliding Republican interests that have quickly turned it into one of the most spirited campaigns in the country.

Liz Cheney, shown in 2010. (Cliff Owen/AP) On the surface, the GOP primary contest between Sen. Mike Enzi and challenger Liz Cheney looks like a familiar tale: A Republican incumbent draws a primary opponent and a heated race ensues. We’ve seen this story unfold in Utah, Indiana and Alaska the past two cycles.

But the Wyoming race doesn’t fit the mold of the tea-party-challenger-vs.-incumbent–perceived-as-moderate campaign. Enzi has a pretty conservative record that doesn’t exactly beg for a challenge. And Cheney isn’t the product of a tea party uprising.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a tea party favorite, backs Enzi. Cheney is the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, a fixture of the GOP establishment for decades. Like her father, Cheney holds hawkish views on foreign policy.

No matter who wins, it’s pretty safe to say that Wyoming’s Senate seat will remain in GOP hands. Democrats wield little to no power in the ruby red state.

On Sunday, a conservative super PAC called the American Principles Fund launched a TV ad casting Cheney as insufficiently conservative on gay marriage. The group is helmed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas governor Mike Hucakbee.

I am concerned enough about your criticism of Cheney's position on immigration to look it up. After all, that is the kind of national issue which concerns me and being wrong on immigration in the Marco Rubio sense is a flat disqualification ranking right up there with being wrong on abortion.

I found this statement from her quoted by the left:

I wouldn’t have voted for it. I think that there were too many good amendments, for example, that were not accepted, such as those offered by Sen. Cruz, that would have provided much more insurance in terms of border security. I am not comfortable with leaving so much discretion in the hands of the secretary for Homeland Security – to decide whether to carry out those provisions of the bill. And I think the bill as it stands now doesn’t deal with the most important issue we’ve got to address first, which is to secure the border.

( http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/20/liz-cheney-speaks-out-on-her-campaign-for-us-senate/#ixzz2hJAj5bOB)

This is not as strong as I would like but it falls within acceptable limits, although just barely.

Another issue of national importance which concerns to me is whether Liz Cheney is, as has been charged on this thread, a neocon who has not sufficiently repented of our excursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Mike Enzi voted for these wars and there is no reason to believe that he has gone out of his way to move toward Rand Paul who, incidentally, supports Enzi. So the question is, do we taint Liz Cheney with the sins of her father?

I have long ago made a full mea culpa on these threads to the effect that I was absolutely wrong about the Iraq war, it is been a disaster for the United States, a disaster of foreign policy proportions, a disaster financially, and a disaster electorally for the Republican Party. Like Senator Enzi, and virtually every other senator, like Vice President Cheney, and no doubt his daughter, I supported the war in Iraq. It is not clear to me whether Senator Enzi or Liz Cheney have repented as much as I have for this mistake.

I am not extremely pleased with Liz Cheney's ambivalent expression concerning immigration. She said she would have voted against it, as did Enzi. A vote is a vote. But it sounds to me like she might, John Cornyn style, well look for a way to vote for it before she votes against it.

In the end it comes down for me to a question whether we can afford to waste an absolutely safe Republican state on a Senator who is sleepwalking through history. On balance, and, as I said in my initial post on this thread, "“I have supported Lynn Cheney in this race not out of overwhelming passion but out of the principle that we ought to summarily execute a few examples to encourage the others."

We have simply got to shake up the Republican Party and Washington. Individual careers no longer are of sufficient consideration, the future of the Republic is really at stake. If Cheney does not measure up, if elected, I would move to throw her ass out too.

>> Liz, Lynn, what is in a name? <<

If you don't even know whether the mother or the daughter is running for the U.S. Senate, I think it's a clear indicator that you're not informed enough about the candidates running for that senate seat to weigh in on which one Wyoming primary voters should choose. If someone didn't know whether Hillary or Bill Clinton was running against Obama in 2008, would you consider their opinion on the race?

>> your fixation about homosexual marriage <<

I posted two replies on this thread prior to this one – the first thread said nothing at all about homosexual marriage and discussed Liz Cheney's flip-flop on Syria and the stupidity of conservative activists who want to purge conservative Senators and re-elect liberal ones. The second thread pointed out that Enzi's critics don't even know whether Lynn or Liz is running for the Senate, and mentioned offhandedly that the candidate's mother is also liberal on issues like homosexual marriage. For that, you responded with a long defense of pro-gay marriage RINOs and claimed numerous times that I am “fixated” on the issue.

>> If your objection to Liz Cheney, or to her mother for that matter, is that they "support" homosexual marriage, ( because an accident of genes has given them a homosexual sister and daughter), to the exclusion of other issues <<

You begin using a liberal premise here, that people in gay relationships are born that way because of an “accident of genes”. Needless to say, I disagree. But getting back on topic, Liz Cheney's problems go far beyond her liberal record on gay issues. The fact she's running as the “more conservative” candidate in the primary but has a proven record of being more liberal than him should be a huge red flag for any objective conservative.

>> Most Americans, including myself, are a lot less interested with what adults do voluntarily and in private <<

Again with the liberal talking points.... evil social conservatives want to use the government to regulate what goes on in the bedroom. In reality, I could care less what Mary Cheney and her lesbian “partner” do “behind closed doors, in private”. They can be together until their dying day and screw til the cows come home. But I do care that they are trying to use the federal (and state governments) to MANDATE that I call their sick relationship a “marriage”, and want to use taxpayers money to celebrate it PUBLICLY, and force churches and religious institutions to “marry” them when it's biologically impossible for such a relationship to form a “marriage”.

>> a lot more concerned with hypocritical, posturing senators selling us out in Washington. <<

Liz Cheney fits that definition to a tee (she's a celebrity because of her posturing on Fox News, and she hypocritically takes numerous positions that do not reflect what she does in real life). So how would electing her to the Senate solve that problem?

>> That train has left the station. <<

So we should reward the people who helped give the left the momentum to make it happen? Roe v. Wade left the station 40 years ago and abortion-on-demand is now the law of the land. Would you want to elect Republicans to the Senate who pushed for it before it became reality?

>> They (the Libs abetted or at least passively condoned by Rinos) are tearing the Constitution to shreds, they are bankrupting America, they are spying on every one of us, they are using the government against us <<

And as they've been doing that, Mike Enzi has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us over 95% of the time, being a staunch ally of Senators like Lee and Cruz, being a reliable conservative vote on the biggest hot button issues of the day like amnesty, gub rights, Obamacare, tax cuts, government spending, etc., etc. No, he's not perfect 100% of the time, but nobody is except Jesus. What is with your fixation on purging Senators who are on the right side of those battles? How does replacing a conservative Republican Senator with a LESS conservative one "save our Republic"? Did replacing Jon Kyl with Jeff Flake improve the Senate? Why not go after liberals and RINOs instead? There are plenty of them up for re-election that NOBODY is running against.

Enzi isn’t “sleep walking.” He’s doing what Wyomingites sent him there to do: Represent WYOMING’s interests.

This is another thing that I think most people on FR who are disparaging Enzi don’t realize: Enzi’s political behavior is in keeping with what Wyomingites want. Effective and low-key.

There’s few things that really stick as sideways in people’s craws around here as a politician who has his face on the tube all the time. Our mayor often gets people really annoyed because in the last two years, it seemed he was everywhere. You couldn’t seem to get away from the guy. Some people pulled him aside this summer and said “You know, there’s a bunch of people on the city council who could be doing some of these appearances. They’re being paid too. They can do some of this. If you’re aspiring to anything more, you’d better quit seeming to inject yourself into every aspect of life in the community.”

And he did just that. Now people are more approving again.

People here like the fact we have a part-time legislature. They don’t like feeling that they need to be engaged in politics all the time, with one eye over their shoulders towards Cheyenne or DC. Most people in Wyoming would dearly love Congress to meet for about 90 days a year and then be forced to go home.

The idea that Enzi isn’t good for Wyoming is another media-created trope. Texans might like their senators big and loud, but a guy like Cruz would get tossed out of office after one term here - not because people disagreed with his positions, not because people thought he was intransigent or some other NY Times’ BS. No, it would be because Cruz is just too loud and in front for people’s taste here. If his primary opponent were conservative and lower-key, Cruz would probably be gone.

Back to Cheney: I don’t have the time to write up huge swathes of background on Cheney. I’ve been talking to people here who “hold paper” on people. People who know the Cheney family - and don’t like them all that much. People who will tell you that Dick isn’t a Wyomingite, and the only reason why he’s welcome at all in the state is because he’s married to a Wyoming gal. Unlike other states that have been swamped with huge waves of change in the last 20 to 40 years, Wyoming’s population remains pretty static, owing to our winters’ ability to get rid of people.

The people who stay have been here for decades to generations. And as a result, there are people who have the dirt on various people and families. The Cheneys have stepped on a bunch of toes around the state with this move, and as a result, some of the dirt people have known about is likely to come out. I think you will be seeing more of it eventually seep into the press.

You want to play that “pour encourages les autres” deal? Then get rid of Linda Graham and/or Juan McCain. Want to send a big message on immigration? Take down Rubio. Want to get a more conservative senator into Wyoming? Then go after Barasso.

Taking down Enzi isn’t going to do what you think it is going to do. It would replace a guy who represented his state well as a conservative with a neo-con who was installed by the GOP-e. The message you’d be sending is “the GOP-e can run the show - and they can do it on a low budget.”

That’s not the message I want to send. I especially don’t want to send a message that we’re going to fall for any more neo-con BS.

Half a century ago the left was scratching around for ways to rationalize their support of William Fulbright of Arkansas. On the one hand they loved his anti-Vietnam war stance and his evident gravitas but on the other hand they were appalled by his racism. So they came up with the idea that his racism was the price he reluctantly forced himself to pay in order to keep his seat in Arkansas.

If I were voting in Wyoming I probably would feel much the way you do but as I said in a previous post I am not judging the Senate race on local issues but on national issues which, sadly, under our new post constitutional system emanate from a legislature in Washington that sits for more than 90 days.

I fully agree with you about getting rid of the Lindsay Grahams, McCains and even Rubios. I would not necessarily have targeted Enzi, it was Liz Cheney who did that, but we deal with the slate we are presented with.

The irony of this is that we tend to be harsher with more conservative senators such as Enzi because they come from conservative states where there is little danger of losing the general to the Democrat. We take after Enzi and leave Susan Collins alone?

At any rate you can comfort yourself that I have no vote in Wyoming and so, even though I have a dog in the fight, I have no say.

I understand your position.

And, like you, I now believe my support for going into Iraq was a huge mistake. I now see the neo-con movement for what it is, and I see that one of the best ways for the GOP to become more popular again is to quit allowing those neo-con clowns in DC to call the GOP’s tune on foreign policy.

If red-diaper Jews want the US to maintain some security interest in the US, they can hawk that policy position to where Jewish voters call home: the DNC. The DNC was the party of war-makers for decades in the 20th century, and the GOP was pretty firmly non-interventionist. Bill Kristol and his ilk can go pound sand. Literally. They can send their young over to foreign lands.

The next biggest problem the GOP has is that the GOP-e keeps ignoring the HUGE polling of the American public that they don’t want amnesty on immigration. The party that ignores the business interests and cracks down on immigration will be rewarded with wage and job growth for Americans - which they can take to the electoral bank in a very short while. One of the reasons why we have such stagnant wage growth in the bottom half of the economic spectrum is because we keep importing huge numbers of low/no skill workers. Why raise wages when we have so much cheap labor flooding into the country? H1B visas should be severely limited as well. Again, the results would be much higher wages.

One of the reasons why petro engineering people make so much more than other engineers is that there are almost no petro engineering college programs outside the US. If you want a petro engineer, you’re most likely going to be hiring a US citizen. Today, that means starting salaries for petro engineers are in the 90’s. EE’s starting salaries have stagnated in the 60’s for about a decade now. That’s due to the flood of H1B’s coming into the country.

It’s high time that we took out the trash in Congress. I am in full agreement there. One of my first and highest issues is immigration. On this issue, Enzi is rock-solid, and MUCH more conservative and pro-US than anyone from the GOP-e will ever be.

>> In your reply directed at me your specific objections to Liz Cheney was that she supported homosexual marriage. You should not be surprised that I responded to that. <<

Once again, I actually mentioned LYNN Cheney (the mom) is liberal on gay marriage, that is a different person than Liz Cheney (the daughter). You are welcome to respond to comment and make your argument that a Republican selling their soul on gay marriage is not a big issue (I strongly disagree, and so do most conservatives: see Rob Portman for proof), but I'd hardly call one sentence about Liz Cheney's mom proof of "a fixation about homosexual marriage" and a judgment on the candidate that is "worse than myopic".

>> I don't buy how to respond to unsupported allegations. If you have evidence that in fact she is hypocritical <<

NVDave, Impy, and Fieldmarshaldj have already given you numerous examples, but I'll add my two cents.

First off, her supporters are being hypocritical when they routinely blast Enzi for not being "outspoken enough", or not being a "fighter", yet they give Liz Cheney a pass whenever she has never spoken about or fought for a conservative issue prior to her Senate race. A prominent example being that Liz Cheney has never once taken a pro-life position prior to being a Senate race, but now suddenly she's "strongly pro-life". Why the double standard for Liz Cheney? Certainly she's been in the public spotlight for many years.

Secondly, her supporters are also being hypocritical because many of them are always on anti-17th amendment threads lecturing the rest of us about how Senators should represent state interests first and foremost, not national interests, and in order to "Save our Republic", we need to get back to that mentality. Yet on Liz Cheney threads, they admit they don't give a hoot what the local issues are in Wyoming, or the fact Liz Cheney hasn't been there since she was 12, lives on the east coast, and knows nothing about the culture and policies of Wyoming. They don't care because they want a celebrity Senator with star power that will get national attention, even if the people of Wyoming get short changed in the process and Liz Cheney is only in Wyoming for photo-ops. Sorry, that's hypocritical. Either you believe U.S. Senators should primarily represent state interests or you don't -- they can't have it both ways.

Third, in their desperation to find flaws in Enzi's record, they criticize him for voting for the Patriotic Act and other hardline military measures, while ignoring the fact Liz Cheney is MORE of an interventionist than him, and cheered on the neo-con stuff every step of the way when she was in the Bush administration. Again -- Liz Cheney is basically lecturing to Mike Enzi. "Do as I say, not as I do"

Fourth, and this reflects the candidate herself (not her supporters), Liz Cheney accuses Enzi of only taking conservative positions because he has a primary challenge (not true -- his voting record has been solidly conservative for years). Yet Liz Cheney has "adjusted" her positions on numerous issues solely because she is now a Senate candidate in Wyoming. A clear example, as I mentioned to you earlier, is her flip-flop on intervention in Syria. Sure, you can argue many of us had a genuine "change of heart" over Iraq and regime change, but Liz Cheney was STILL cheerleading for overthrowing Assad in 2013, and ONLY changed her position overnight when the polls showed that position was politically toxic in Wyoming.

Fifth, I'm going to go back to the homosexual marriage thing (gasp!) because she's being a hypocrite here, too. She now claims she doesn't support it, after championing it for years. Yet there is no doubt she attended her sister's gay wedding and gave it her blessing. Damn right that's hypocritical. I don't want to hear the "what did you expect her to do -- it was her OWN sister, she HAD to!" excuse. Many people, including many conservative politicians, have relatives who engage in behavior that they don't approve in, and none of us decide we have to cheer them on and celebrate it so we won't hurt their feelings.

Sixth, Liz Cheney runs around Wyoming on a platform about how we need to elect her because Republicans should be "opposing Obama at every turn", yet in recent years, she's appeared on liberal news stations like MSNBC and praised Obama on certain major policy issues, including offering bipartisan support for his activism for "gay rights!" (yes, again with the gay thing... but it covers much more than just gay marriage). Sorry, that's hypocritical. It's ironic her supporters falsely accuse Enzi of doing thing, since I've never seen Enzi come on TV and praise some scheme Obama has.

>> has supported liberal clauses other than homosexuality bring it on and if it holds water I might well change my position. Meanwhile, I await facts. <<

Again, as others have pointed out to you, one of the most important issues on the table right now is amnesty for illegal aliens (I suppose you'll tell us "that ship has already sailed" since the Senate passed an amnesty bill, right?). We know where Mike Enzi is on this issue, and he's one of the very few Senators who have been rock solid against rewarding illegals, and voting to secure the borders instead of just offering lip service about it. Even most of the otherwise reliable conservatives in the Senate -- like Jeff Flake and Orrin Hatch -- are too wedding to the Washington establishment and willing to sell out on this issue. That includes Liz. Liz Cheney was all for a "path to citizenship" (the official Bush administration policy) as a loyal Bush administration official in the mid 2000s. Now she speaks in vague generalities about the issue and won't commit to a specific plan about immigration. Do you really want to throw out one of our few totally dependable allies on this issue, with someone whose position is "?" at best?

Likewise, there is little doubt Mike Enzi has ALWAYS been a reliable champion for the rights of the unborn and fighting the culture of death in America. Again, contrast that to Liz Cheney who is "strongly pro-life" as a month ago, and never once supported pro-lifers at ANY previous time in her life, (although she certainly was "outspoken" on other issues like foreign policy). At best, even if she keeps her campaign promise, Liz Cheney would not be as forceful on social issues as Enzi is. (again, that makes her a hypocrite on the "he's not a fighter" campaign theme)

I just fail to see what you'd accomplish by wasting numerous conservative money and resources to purge a rock solid conservative and replace him with a pampered politician's kid from the east coast who is ideologically to the left of him. How does that move the Senate to the right? Because it scares other Republicans? It seems we tried your theory a few years ago when Michael Steel was run out of town on a rail, and replaced with Reince Prebius, who is worse. Did that improve things over at the RNC?

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