Carpet Bagging, Liz Cheney & the Cowboy State: The Looming US Senate Battle for Wyoming

The daughter of former US Vice President Dick Cheney has announced her intention to run against Senate incumbent Mike Enzi from Wyoming in the upcoming 2014 Republican primary. There’s nothing strange about that in itself, except Liz Cheney was not born in Wyoming and has lived elsewhere for the majority of her life – leading many to accuse her of ‘carpet bagging.’

Ever since Cheney packed up her suburban home in Washington’s beltway last year and moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming it was tipped she had her eye on higher office.

Conscious that she would be criticised of ‘carpet bagging’ –the term used to refer to politicians who run in an area where they have only lived for a short amount of time – Cheney hit out first in her announcement listing generations of ancestors who came to call Wyoming home.

The term ‘Carpet Bagging’ was originally a pejorative term used to describe Northerners who moved to the South during the Reconstruction period in the 1860s and 1870s.

This did not stop Wyoming Congresswoman Cynthia Lummins from telling reporters Cheney’s move was ‘bad form’. Lummins said: “It is a unique strategy to live your entire life elsewhere and then come to a state a year before you’re going to announce you’re going to run for that state’s highest office,” the Congresswoman all but saying that Cheney was not really from Wyoming.

Lummins may not be the most reliable judge of the circumstances, given she told the media last month that she had her eye on Enzi’s senate seat if he were to retire. Revealingly she told the media “I think she’s [Cheney’s] skipping everyone over” – everyone being her.

In her faceoff with Enzi, Cheney will assume the role of ‘outsider’ – opposed by the Republican establishment. In her announcement Cheney said, “we can’t continue business as usual in Washington” – the trademark statement of any candidate attempting to run against the Washington brand.

Liz Cheney announced via aYouTube that she would be candidate for the Senate in Wyoming, placing her up against incumbent Senator Mike Enzi.

Cheney’s outsider status is cemented by the barrage of opposition to her candidacy from Enzi’s Republican colleagues. Fellow Wyoming Senator John Barrasso said “Enzi is a friend, a mentor, and a tremendous U.S. senator for Wyoming. I support his re-election,” a sentiment which was echoed by John McCain and Rand Paul. The National Republican Senatorial Committee backed Enzi, continuing its long held tradition of backing incumbents in primary challenges.

Cheney is not without her own supporters. Controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh threw his support behind Cheney declared her to be ‘one of the biggest contributions’ that her father Dick Cheney has done for America. Continuing the theme, Fox News host Sean Hannity and Fox Contributor Charles Krauthammer also declared their support for Cheney.

The 2014 primary will be a battle between conservatives, with Cheney placing herself to the right of Senator Enzi – a difficult task given he was named the eighth most conservative Senator in 2012. Nonetheless, Cheney is targeting Enzi’s occasional willingness to compromise with Democrats. In a thinly veiled critique of the sitting senator, Cheney pronounced that she “will never compromise when our freedom is at stake.”

Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) pictured centre right behind President Obama in 2009. Enzi has been criticised for occasionally compromising with Democrats – pictures like this will no doubt be used in Cheney’s Republican primary challenge to illustrate this.

Looking broader, Cheney’s eyes are firmly placed on the President telling Rush Limbaugh that Obama “is the most radical man who’s ever inhabited the oval office.” Furthering this she stated that Republicans place the nation’s values at risk when they compromise with Obama’s agenda.

Despite presenting herself as an outsider candidate, all signs point to a DC insider. As the daughter of a former vice president, Cheney has lived in the beltways of Washington DC for most of her life. Cheney has also had a long career in the US State Department where she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs from 2002 and was promoted to Principal Deputy in 2005.

Carpet bagging is hardly rare in American politics. Hillary Clinton successfully managed to pull it off having been elected as Senator for New York in 2000. Cheney is not the first and will hardly be the last to make such a move, although unlike Hillary it seems she faces an uphill battle with initial polling suggesting a 54-26 lead for Enzi.

Cheney believes that talk of carpet bagging is merely a distraction, “my sense is, as far as the carpetbagger charge is, it’s from people who don’t want to talk about substance, don’t want to talk about the issues.”

In the end it is for the Wyomingites to decide. Would they prefer Enzi, an established Republican insider, or Cheney, a more conservative ‘outsider’?