GIVE NO
GROUND
says Kevin Kellems, Dick Cheney’s
communications director during
his vice presidential years. “You
protect The Man at all costs. And
two, if the enemy takes a shot at
you, you never, ever, ever admit
any level of accuracy on their part.
You always, always refute it. It is
the centerpiece of their DNA.” It’s a
tendency that blossomed in the fiery days after 9/11, and grew strong
still as Dick Cheney’s reputation
collapsed with the Bush administration. “Give no ground was the
operating principle of the Cheney
operation. Give no ground, ever.”
In prosecuting this principle,
Cheney doesn’t primarily trade in
the insider tactics associated with
her dad. Rather, she takes after her
mom, the academic-turned-culture warrior who was a polarizing
Clinton-era cable denizen in her
own right. “People that are mad
at her are mad because they think
this is all about ambition and she’s
more like her mother than her father,” says the Enzi donor.
With a major exception: Lynne,
who ran the National Endowment
for the Humanities back when
Dick was a mere congressman,
has her own professional identity. Liz, despite her own personal
interests, has spent much of her
HUFFINGTON
01.19.14
career in the Dick Cheney business. In 1978, when former White
House chief of staff Dick Cheney
briefly relocated to Wyoming to
run for Congress, 12-year-old Liz
campaigned with him. (At one
stump speech, preteen Liz shot
back at a pair of hostile questioners who wanted to know why her
dad was so eager to move back
to Washington; she remembers
the incident as the first time she
truly put on the Cheney jersey.) In
1989, when former Representative
Dick Cheney became secretary
of defense, recent college graduate Liz joined the administration,
too. When former Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney ran for vice
president, newly minted lawyer
Liz followed her dad into the campaign and onto the public payroll.
And when former Vice President
Dick Cheney’s legacy fell into disfavor under Barack Obama, Liz,
now a 47-year-old mother of five,
became one of the new president’s
most vociferous critics.
In its way, the give-no-ground
approach worked when it came to
defending Dick Cheney: After all,
a flack isn’t supposed to acknowledge differing views. Once Liz was
out to become The Man, though,
it proved a serious liability. For
a mainstay of the Bush-Cheney
GOP, navigating Obama-era Republican politics required rein-