Former VP Dick Cheney passed away this week, with few people taking notice. Some goof at National Review managed to write up an extra silly article that stated somehow it was Cheney who stuck by his conservative principles while the GOP changed out from under him.

Sorry, the Republican mainstream is right where it’s always been -- from Lincoln, to Dirksen, to Reagan, to Trump. But Cheney, like others of his generation, was in politics for his personal aggrandizement.

When one of his daughters came out as gay, suddenly he found himself in full support of the ridiculous same-sex marriage movement, even as it twisted the Constitution into a pretzel. When the other daughter wanted to advance her House career in 2016, he endorsed Donald Trump. When she saw an opportunity in 2021 with the other side, the Cheney family was all in on the anti-Trump lawfare.

Few GOP leaders have been blessed with so much good fortune during their lives and wound up doing so little. A good public high school student, he got a full-ride scholarship to Yale back in the late 1950s, because before the baby boomers, such things went begging. Still, he managed to fail out twice only to complete his degrees back in Wyoming -- with the insistence of his sweetheart Lynne, who was the brains in the family. Marrying Lynne also got him out of the draft.

Both were in grad school in Wisconsin when Dick lucked out and got a job with Congressman Bill Steiger. As I like to say, the greatest Republican you never heard of. From there he went to work for Donald Rumsfeld when he was busy dismantling the Great Society for the Nixon White House.

Cheney attached himself to Rumsfeld as both thrived in the Ford White House and then later in corporate America. Cheney was at the famous meeting where Art Laffer first drew up the Laffer curve. Ford never understood it, but Ronald Reagan did, and the rest is history.

Cheney easily won the House seat from Wyoming because nobody in that state wants to go to an Ivy League college or work in D.C. (They’d much rather be real cowboys all day and I don’t blame them) Then he took all the credit as Bush 41’s SecDef when Ronald Reagan’s military crushed Saddam in the Gulf War.

Unfortunately, when he returned to power as VP for Bush 43 and tried to make a sequel to the Gulf War, it proved a failure. The key to Dick Cheney’s success in life had always been to just hang on to smarter people and ride along. In the Bush 43 administration, sadly, he was the smartest person.

He did bring in Rumsfeld to be SecDef, but Rumsfeld had been out of public life for 20 years, and it showed. Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad, Henry Kissinger’s protégé, Paul Bremer, and even David Frum, won all the bureaucratic skirmishes and lost all the actual wars.   

Ordinary Republicans looked at the wreckage of the Bush years and wisely decided we needed better people. Even if that means electing a trash-talking New York billionaire as President. Or unimpressive characters like Margorie Taylor Green to Congress. Just as long as they are not part of the old establishment. Historic political realignment has begun. Both parties are shaking out parts of their coalition. For the GOP, that means a return to limited government, law and order, and the sensible use of force abroad.

But the Dems are going far left, like a European socialist party, only with race-based identity politics. Regrettably they will find plenty of takers. We will have to spend the next several decades trying to argue our fellow Americans away from such foolishness.  

I can’t help but think how much bigger this job will be because of all the high-level Republican Dick Cheney-types, who lived the good life for years inside the Beltway and neglected the kind of practical politics that might have built on the successes of the Reagan era.  

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.

Image: Gage Skidmore