During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz touted the broad coalition supporting him and his running mate, Kamala Harris. “Dick Cheney, Bernie Sanders, Taylor Swift . . .”
It’s the kind of reference to former Vice President Cheney that Harris, Walz, and their surrogates have made many times throughout their campaign. Stewart, to his credit, seemed to find it painful. “What country,” he asked, “did Taylor Swift get us to invade?”
Walz laughed it off, assuring him that Harris didn’t plan to have a Cheney-style foreign policy. He answered Stewart’s question about whether “we really have to do” the “Cheney thing” by speculating that the endorsements from the former vice president and his daughter Liz Cheney gave moderate Republicans and libertarians “permission” to “cross over.”
He’s probably wrong about that. And even if a few Republican votes are won in the process, the campaign’s rehabilitation of the reputation of one of the most notorious war criminals of the twenty-first century is disgusting.
As a matter of pragmatic electoral calculation, Walz is almost certainly wrong. Dick Cheney’s approval rating when he left office was 13 percent. Harris was already in grave danger of losing Michigan, a crucial swing state, and it’s hard to imagine a bigger middle finger to that state’s massive Arab American population than touting the endorsement of the architect of the most horrifying aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
And even among…
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Auteur: Ben Burgis
