Endorsements: South Carolina, Wyoming, California's Inland Empire

Here in Southern California, there's a little bit of controversy in CA-31 (San Bernardino and the 'burbs between Upland and Redlands) over the "unanimous" and coordinated endorsements by 4 Democratic Clubs of DCCC empty suit Pete Aguilar over three better-qualified Democratic candidates. One DCCC operative told me these kinds of phony club endorsements are standard procedure for the DCCC to help prop up weak candidates like Aguilar. Former Congressman Joe Baca, running for his old seat despite a vicious and determined campaign against him led by Steve Israel, told me this week that 2 of the clubs are in other districts and that the other two have 4 members each-- and that the 4 members don't even go to the "meetings." These were faked endorsements to try to stampede the California Democratic Party to go along with Steve Israel's terrible decision to endorse Aguilar, who already lost the very blue (D+5) district to TWO Republicans in 2012.

Normal people don't necessarily care about endorsements, but some endorsements-- though not from these fakes clubs-- come with resources. Certainly a California Democratic Party endorsement has immense value in a Democratic primary. Baca told me that Aguilar doesn't have the brains to manipulate the system that way but that Steve Israel sure does. And then there's Eric Bauman, the would-be Jesse Unruh of California's Democratic Party, who has also been working behind the scenes on behalf of Aguilar.

There are good reasons the Democratic Party has worked up rules about not interfering in viable primaries. Political careerists who undermine those rules should be fired. Then people will think twice about doing it again.

Nationally, though there are other stories in the endorsement game this week, namely South Carolina's junior appointed senator, Tim Scott going on CNN's Crossfire and pointedly refusing to endorse South Carolina's senior senator, Lindsay Graham, who's struggling for political survival against a bevy of blood-thirsty teabaggers. (See video up top.)

The endorsement/non-endorsement story that's captured the public's mind though is, of course, the ugly controversy roiling the Cheney family. Liz Cheney, an ambitious extremist, is trying to unseat very conservative senator Mike Enzi in Wyoming and has relocated there from her home in Virginia. Her polling numbers are dreadful-- 69-17% in the latest poll-- so she decided to brutally throw her sister's family under the bus to get some attention. People who don't even follow politics are sickened by Liz Cheney's ogre-like behavior, worse than anything one would ever even expect from her father!

Politico reported that Mary Cheney has now publicly asserted that she won't be endorsing the evil sister's campaign. Liz Cheney blames the whole mess on Enzi, of course.

Unbeknownst even to some of her closest friends and advisers, her newly announced opposition to gay marriage had caused a major rift in the famously close Cheney family, and she and Mary were no longer on speaking terms. Days after we talked it all became public, when, in a series of Facebook posts as devastating as they were surprising, Mary blasted her sister’s stance against marriage equality. “Liz’s position is to treat my family as second class citizens,” Mary wrote. “This isn't like a disagreement over grazing fees or what to do about Iran.” The public rebuke was the first communication between the sisters since August, and soon their parents, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, found themselves dragged into the imbroglio, issuing a statement defending Liz.

But Mary wasn’t done speaking out. In a series of emails to me this week, as the news of her break with her sister spread, Mary wrote, “I’m not supporting Liz’s candidacy.” She later clarified: “By supporting, I mean not working, not contributing, and not voting for (I’m registered in Virginia not Wyoming).” The best she could say of the sister who was once her close friend and confidante was a final postscript: “I am not saying I hope she loses to Enzi.”

For a family renowned for its togetherness and discipline-- “It’s very un-Cheney-like for one arm of the family to do something the other part doesn’t know about in the political sphere and cause any degree of heartburn,” says one former adviser to Dick Cheney—the public squabbling has been a shock. And what began as a race that seemed certain to tear apart the Republican Party in Wyoming has been transformed into something that once seemed unfathomable: the race that’s torn apart the Cheney family.

…Until this week’s very public disagreement, the Cheneys had succeeded for years in keeping the political and the personal in delicate balance when it came to the issue of Mary’s sexuality. Granted, that wasn’t always easy. When she came out to her parents as a high school junior, as she tells the story in Now It’s My Turn, her mother burst into tears and said, “Your life will be so hard.” (Dick, for his part, told her, “You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy.”) By the time Bush offered Dick the vice presidency in 2000, one of his biggest hesitations, Mary writes, was about what such a move would mean for her. “Personally, I’d rather not be known as the vice president’s lesbian daughter,” Mary told him. “But, if you’re going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you. I want to do whatever I can to help out on the campaign.” Help she did, along with Liz, and over the next eight years of the Bush administration, the two sisters, who were already close, grew even closer. To the extent Mary’s sexuality intruded into the world of politics, it only seemed to draw the sisters tighter together.

Never more so than in 2004. That year began with Mary contemplating quitting her job on the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of the president’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which proposed to ban same-sex marriage. As Mary recalls in her memoir, when she asked to discuss the matter with her father at the White House, Lynne and Liz joined them, and all three urged her to remain on the campaign-- noting that they themselves disagreed with Bush on the issue. But they also told her they would understand and support her decision if she did resign. Mary chose to stay on and, later in that campaign, when Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, each separately raised the issue of her sexuality during the debates, the Cheneys were furious. Lynne declared Kerry was “not a good man” and denounced his “cheap and tawdry political trick.” When Edwards debated their father, Liz and Lynne went so far as to stick their tongues out at him, while Mary glared at the Democrat and, borrowing one of her father’s famous expressions, silently mouthed the words “Go fuck yourself.”

By the time Dick left office, it seemed clear that the Cheneys had navigated a complicated issue with no negative political consequences-- and family solidarity intact. And, in the years since, it appeared the family's balancing act would only get easier: While the Republican Party remained solidly against gay marriage, public opinion-- even inside the GOP-- was shifting rapidly toward more friendly views about homosexuality. The rest of the country looked like it was catching up with the Cheneys.

But living in Washington is different from living in Wyoming, a fact that Liz Cheney may not have fully reckoned with when she announced in July that she would take on Enzi in next year’s Republican primary. When Cheney jumped into the race, the assumption among the political cognoscenti was that the incumbent was in trouble. The low-key, at times lumbering 69-year-old former CPA-- a politician so square and old-fashioned that he carries a briefcase onto the Senate floor, where he seldom utters a word-- was presumed to be no match for the young, media-savvy, slashing-and-burning daughter of the former vice president. It was an impression Enzi himself reinforced when, upon hearing the news of Cheney’s entrance into the race, he lamented to reporters, “I thought we were friends.”

Few, if any of the early accounts of Cheney’s candidacy even mentioned the matter of her sister, and at first it seemed her biggest problem would be dismissing the carpetbagger label. Although Cheney claims to be a fourth-generation Wyomingite, she did not live in the state-- save for two years as a young girl-- until 2012, when she moved her family from northern Virginia into a $1.6 million home in the tony resort town of Jackson Hole.