She’s Sharp, With a Soft Side

“You’re being so nice,” Lynne Cheney said to her husband, by way of signaling that she was not about to be.

With that, the wife of the vice president of the United States took over from Dick Cheney. He had given a wordy government-speak response to a questioner’s complaint about costlier Medicare premiums. His answer included only a mild rebuke of Sen. John F. Kerry.

“I’ve watched Sen. Kerry go across the country lambasting the president about the 17% increase,” she said, “when he actually voted for it.” Kerry did not specifically vote for the 17% increase -- it was mandated under a 1997 law requiring premiums to rise as costs do.

But Lynne Cheney’s point was clear, even if the reference wasn’t.

She was speaking Wednesday at a town hall meeting at a Big Boy restaurant in Clio, Mich., just off Interstate 75. But it could have been any recent day -- say, Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or later that day in the Iowa farming community of Nevada, or here in northwestern New Mexico on Saturday.

As the vice president travels through the most hotly contested states in the presidential election, his wife is at his side, playing an active, animated role.

She introduces her husband at each stop, telling the story of their teenage courtship -- and softening up the image of the former defense secretary long aligned with the Republican Party’s most hawkish factions.

She sits at his side in his frequent question-and-answer sessions. Often speaking on her own initiative, she offers biting commentary on Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards.

In recreation centers, county fair barns and hotel ballrooms, the vice president and his wife sit on matching four-legged wooden stools with swiveling seats.

Along with two large pillows for their hotel room, the furniture travels with them. As the Cheneys emerge from a forward door on Air Force Two, the stools are taken out the rear door, placed in a van in their motorcade, and set up at event sites moments before they walk in.

As they take their seats, she tells the audience that they’ve known each other since they were 14 when he was “sweeping out the Ben Franklin store” in their hometown of Casper, Wyo. He worked hard “stringing power line all across the West to pay his way through school.”

He tells the story of the move that brought his family to Casper from Lincoln, Neb., and says that had the move not taken place, he and Lynne would not have met and she would have married someone else -- and, he says, her response to that is that the other guy would have become vice president of the United States. She gives the audience a look that suggests she never said any such thing.

In their campaign appearances, the vice president plays the central role, to be sure. But when his wife speaks up, more often than not her commentary -- offered as he finishes his response to a question -- sharpens his answer.

As the controversy over Teresa Heinz Kerry’s remark that Laura Bush had never held a “real job” was dying down at the end of the week, Lynne Cheney made sure Heinz Kerry’s comments would not be forgotten.

On Saturday, she told an enthusiastic but small crowd in a high school gymnasium that the first lady “is wise and warm and gracious. She’s a teacher. She’s a librarian. And Mrs. Bush and the president know that raising a family is a real job.”

The day before, the vice president, in response to a question about Iraq, reiterated in his matter-of-fact monotone the administration’s desire to keep U.S. troops there not one day longer than necessary.

She took over with her assessment of news coverage of the war: “There is a sort of media bias that says good news is no news, and so what we get is the bad news. We don’t hear about all the schools the Marines have built. We don’t hear about the men and women who are leading better lives,” she said.

“I get on the Internet and, you know, read some of the Web logs and there are some really interesting stories.... People in Iraq say how grateful they are for the freedoms the Americans have brought.”

Lynne Cheney is well versed in public speaking and public policy. She earned a doctorate in 19th century British literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and is a former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“One of the most talented women in America,” Sen. Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, said Saturday as he introduced her. “Lynne Cheney will never let us down.”

Although her husband spoke of their daughter Mary in August when discussing his opposition to a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage and said she was a lesbian, Lynne Cheney has not addressed her daughter’s sexuality publicly.

But when Kerry mentioned it at the final debate, it was Lynne Cheney who spoke out hours later, introducing a theme she pursued for several days.

Referring to the Democratic candidate, she said: “This is not a good man. And of course, I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man -- what a cheap and tawdry political trick.” She never mentioned her daughter. Nonetheless, her words as always, made her point clear.