Today we are taking a new look at Liz Cheney’s latest performance of “Profiles in Courage” leadership. In any political era we have ever known, pundits would be fast-typing flourishing predictions that we may have just witnessed Chapter One in a book titled: “The Making of America’s First Woman President.”
Except we all are too smart to fall for that. We know we are trapped in an era of wackadoodle politics. Day and night, we have watched the leaders of the once-Grand Old Party breakdancing atop the quicksand of our wackadoodle politics. We watched their every flip and flop: Rebuking Donald Trump for his loopy, looping Big Lie that he won reelection by a landslide; but then rebuking Cheney for continuing to tell that truth and pushing her out of her House Republican leadership position. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke truth about Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, now wants you to forget he ever said what he said.
Change can happen quite quickly in politics. Let me tell you about it: Google my name plus “R.I.P., G.O.P.” Among the things that pop up is a handsome blue book cover bearing that title and my name – with lots of websites, including Amazon, telling you that you can buy the 2016 book from them.
But you can’t. Because I never wrote it. Because change happened, quickly.
A prominent book publisher had wanted me to write that book (based on the shrinking traditional white Republican voter base) and deliver it before the 2016 presidential primary voting had started. But in June 2015, Donald Trump glided down his golden escalator and into the campaign – where he was quickly dismissed as just a national punchline. But Trump was drawing huge crowds – and the more I reported, the more I was convinced this was our new reality. They reminded me of the crowds Alabama’s segregationist/populist George Wallace had drawn up North in 1968 – I discovered many blue-collar backers of just-assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, who were fed up with feeling ignored by all the other pols.