Liz Cheney takes aim at the Senate - and a GOP incumbent

Like father, like daughter?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is about as polarizing a political figure as you can find in the United States. As much as conservatives admire him (more so than the man he served as veep, President George W. Bush), liberals loathe him with an equal passion.

Now Cheney’s daughter Liz is running for office, and her candidacy is getting off to a divisive start - in her own party. That’s because she’s mounting a primary challenge to Wyoming’s senior Republican senator, Michael B. Enzi, and it’s driving some GOP stalwarts crazy.

They should stop acting as if incumbents were entitled to a smooth path to reelection.

Enzi announced Tuesday that he would run for his fourth term in 2014. Minutes later, Cheney released a video on YouTube declaring her intention to run for Enzi’s seat, without naming the incumbent. In it, she blasted the federal government for growing too large and intrusive over the last four years - a period that begins, not surprisingly, after her father left Washington.

Her criticism of Enzi wasn’t explicit, yet it was unmistakable. “I’m running because I believe it is necessary for a new generation of leaders to step up to the plate,” said Cheney, 46. (Enzi is 69.) “I’m running because I know, as a mother and a patriot, we can no longer go along to get along. We can’t continue business as usual in Washington.”

Enzi has been a reliable vote for the GOP bloc in the Senate, but some conservative groups - including the Club for Growth and Heritage Action - give him middling grades on their issues.

According to my colleague Mark Barabak in Washington, Enzi, “a family friend of the Cheneys,” seemed blindsided by the announcement. Wrote Barabak: “She said that if I ran she wasn’t going to run, but obviously that wasn’t correct,” Enzi told reporters in the Capitol. “I thought we were friends.”

Somewhat predictably, Enzi’s colleagues quickly lined up behind him, and the head of the Senate’s GOP campaign committee, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, pledged to back him in the primary - even if that meant spending less to challenge Democratic incumbents in other states. That’s music to the ears of Democrats, whose hold on the Senate looks shaky (according to Nate Silver, at least).

Personally, I think the Republican powers that be should stand down. In fact, they should welcome Cheney to the race.

Too often, parties look at those who challenge incumbents in primaries as threats to the larger goal of establishing or maintaining governing majorities. But just as disruptive innovation can be bad for industry leaders but good for industries as a whole, so can primary challenges bring new energy and thinking into a party and a government.

It may not be a great thing in the short term; the dysfunction in Washington today stems at least in part from an influx of new House Republicans who are particularly unwilling to compromise into an environment with a decreasing number of centrists and savvy dealmakers in either party.

In the long term, though, it’s more dangerous to create what amounts to an entitlement to reelection. It’s bad enough that the prohibitive expense of a congressional race gives incumbents a huge head start over any candidate who’s not independently wealthy. Party organizations only make things worse when they circle the wagons against primary challengers.

I don’t mean to suggest that Cheney brings something unique to the race. Her video comes across less as a revealing personal declaration than a methodical exercise in touching all the “tea party” bases (e.g., the evils of Obamacare and the administration’s threats to personal freedom). Just in case anyone missed the point, she declares near the end of the nearly six-minute clip, “I know we are [T]axed more than [E]nough [A]lready.”

But I wouldn’t deny any challenger the right to claim the anti-government mantle, even if they come from a family that epitomizes the Republican establishment.

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Follow Jon Healey on Twitter @jcahealey