The Cheney Endorsement and the Missed Opportunity

Former Vice President Dick Cheney (R, WY) has endorsed former Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) for president this fall.

Taking what they probably think is the higher road, former President George W. Bush (R, TX) and former Vice President Mike Pence (R, IN) have not endorsed Harris, but instead of politely keeping it to themselves, they have instead publicly announced that they’re not endorsing President Trump.

Since the natural assumption is that Democrat officeholders would endorse the Democrat candidate, and Republican officeholders would endorse the Republican, both the Harris campaign and its lackeys in the mainstream media are making the most of the fact that some Republicans, are not supporting President Donald J. Trump (R, FL) in his 2024 bid for a return to the White House.

Considering everything Harris and Walz have going against them – both their personal and professional records as constant personal and professional failures, leaving every office they’ve touched in worse shape for their involvement – it’s understandable that they would jump at such endorsements by a few bitter or angry political hands. They need whatever positives they can get, to outweigh the negatives they’ve been building for themselves ever since entering adulthood.

And it is similarly understandable that some of these Republicans would not like President Trump. In all three of President Trump’s candidacies, but especially his first one, he featured a sophomoric type of insult humor aimed directly at several major Republican officeholders and their bosses, especially the Bushes and Cheneys.

Many of Trump’s supporters were uncomfortable with the intra-party divisiveness of this approach from the beginning, fearing that it would cost him a share of the good Republicans in the electorate who grew up with President Reagan’s famous emphasis on the 11^th commandment: thou shalt speak no ill of a fellow Republican.

But Trump won the support of a lot of independents and converted Democrats – in both 2016 and 2020 – specifically because of that choice. By being willing to call out the Bushes and Cheneys for certain policy disagreements (largely those in which the Bushes and Cheneys behaved more like Democrats, if truth be told), many disaffected voters realized that Trump was not a member of the figurative RINO country club (despite his well-known ownership of literal ones).

One might argue that Trump’s victories owed a good deal to those insults against George and Jeb. The American people knew they needed someone in the White House who would take a different approach from both recent Democrat and Republican administrations.

That approach did residual damage, however. It left a field of burned egos behind, egos that would jump at the opportunity to endorse Trump’s opponent as soon as this general election arrived.

So on a personal level, we shouldn’t be surprised.

That being said, however – we should also look upon it on a professional level. These are all politicians, who allegedly have the best interests of the country at heart throughout their careers.

That includes the signers of a public letter; 200 unknowns who served moderate and liberal Republicans in the past, and are now supporting the Democrats, happily endorsing the Harris/Walz ticket this fall.

That one is perhaps even easier to understand, since political aides at that level are so often the unprincipled power-lusting hands that you remember from your college political science classes. Those kids – the kids who wanted to live in Washington, DC, where the action is, and to get the chance to regulate our society because they know better than the rest of us – grew up and got jobs and did what they wanted, exerting influence across the leviathan, largely unsupervised regardless of whether the White House was ostensibly Republican or Democrat.

These creatures of the swamp – often known today as the Deep State – are threatened only when someone like Donald Trump is in office. When Reagan arrived, he brought in the Grace Commission to cull those ranks, but that was 43 years ago now. And after all that time, President Trump is planning on bringing on Elon Musk to chair a similar commission.

Democrats grow the destructive bureaucracy like a rainforest; most Republicans just prune it moderately. President Trump, in both his last term and his next one, is the one candidate who recognizes the need to take a machete to it. There are agencies and bureaus so malevolent that they need to be completely redirected, hamstrung, or even dissolved.

The problem this poses to many of the NeverTrumpers is that – unlike the Democrats who have always supported such bureaucracy-creep – a percentage of current and past Republican office holders has pretended to be on the side of the pruning, without ever actually delivering on those promises. We have voted for limited-government Republicans who talked a good game but were exposed by President Trump as having been half-hearted in their efforts, sometimes even personally profiting from the Democratic policies that they only limply opposed.

For such people to endorse Kamala Harris this fall doesn’t tell us so much about our vote this fall as it tells us about our votes in the future. When these power-hungry pols themselves run for state or federal legislature in the future – or when some future governor or president nominates them for a judgeship, secretary post, or commission member – we will know from their endorsement of Harris what kind of people they really are, and we will know from that alone that they should be opposed.

Sadder, though, is what these more famous endorsements of Harris, such as Cheney – or the non-endorsements like Bush and Pence – tell us about their personal egos, their personal values, their personal sense of responsibility to the country.

We may have long known that these were not solid, rock-rib Reaganites (though Pence certainly looked like one the longest, thanks to his ACU rating). But we thought they were at least true believers in the general Republican philosophy – the American work ethic, the Founding Fathers’ principles of limited government and personal freedom, the rule of law, and the Judeo-Christian tradition at the heart of Western Civilization.

By allowing their understandable personal dislike of Donald Trump to color their voting choice this way – to the point of opposing a presidential ticket in line with their professed values and instead, supporting one in direct contradiction to their professed values – they reveal their own souls as far darker, far sadder, than we might ever have imagined.

Harris and Walz, after all, are not the moderate Democrats of the 19^th century, or even the big-spending liberals of the 20^th. Their records show them to be far to the left of their own party, squarely situated at the socialist end of any political scale. They support unlimited taxation and unbridled government growth, the social extremism of taxpayer-funded abortion on demand and the dilution of both the electorate and the workforce through open borders. There is virtually no limit to the anti-Americanism of the Harris-Walz ticket.

And yet, the Bushes and Cheneys endorse them, so bitterly does Trump’s 2016 insult humor sting their fragile little feelings.

There once was a time when we raised our children with the understanding that you don’t need to like a politician to vote for him; you’re never going to have lunch or dinner with him anyway, so who cares if you get along? What matters is that he or she represents you in office. Vote for the candidate with whom you agree, not the one you’d like to grab a beer with.

Since the dawn of the television age, we have forgotten this simple rule; more and more voters, generation after generation, want to vote for someone they like, someone they identify with, someone they’d date. They pay more attention to a full head of hair and a wide smile than they pay to a candidate’s depth of commitment to the Constitution and the principles of the nation.

Endorsements mean much more in an open race between untried candidates; this one is more of a race between incumbents. We have seen how well the nation worked under Trump, and we have seen how horribly the national has suffered under Biden and Harris.

So these endorsements won’t likely have an effect on this fall’s election, much to the chagrin of the Harris-Walz campaign team, as they struggle to escape their own countless negatives.

But it was indeed a missed opportunity. Imagine if Cheney, Bush and Pence had instead issued a joint communication, declaring that despite their personal dislike for President Trump and their past disagreements on personal matters, it is simply undeniable that the Harris-Walz ticket would be potentially lethal to constitutional governance in the United States, and President Trump has proven a respect for limited government and the American way that clearly merit his restoration to office.

It is a message that this nation and the world need to hear. Instead, they allow old wounds to fester and side with their nation’s enemies. A sad way to end their political careers.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.

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