"Cheney Hits Heartland, and He Can Feel the Love
By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: October 17, 2006
TOPEKA, Kan., Oct. 12 — Grace Mosier lives with her mom and dad, goes to birthday parties, takes ballet classes and is just like a lot of other 6-year-old girls. Except that she happens to be obsessed with Dick Cheney.
“I really, really like him,” says Grace, who can tell you what state the vice president was born in (Nebraska), where he went to grade school (College View, in Lincoln) and the names of his dogs (Dave and Jackson). She gets her fix of Cheney fun-facts by visiting the White House Web site for children. It says there that his favorite teacher was Miss Duffield and that he used to run a company called Halliburton.
So when Mr. Cheney came to town Thursday, Grace was at Forbes Field, holding a little American flag and a sign that said, “Welcome, Mr. Vice President, pet Dave and Jackson for me.” She watched him get off Air Force Two, step into a car and speed off to a fund-raiser.
“Like a rock star coming to town,” says Dene Mosier, Grace’s mother. And while Mr. Cheney might be an unusual object for a 6-year-old’s fixation, it is probably less unusual here, in the heart of Cheney Country.
The terrain consists of hotel ballrooms, military bases and private homes deep in the reddest of red states like Kansas (where President Bush and Mr. Cheney won by 25 percentage points in 2004). As a rule, people still love Mr. Bush in Cheney Country, at least relative to some locales. But the president cannot be everywhere, so Mr. Cheney comes instead, exposing as he goes the durability and devotion of his party’s base.
He is dispatched around the country — to Topeka last week, to Casper, Wyo., the week before, and to Wyoming, Mich., the week before that — to preside over events largely ignored by the national news media but covered big-time by the local press. He raises a lot of cash for the Republican Party and its candidates — more than $40 million at 114 events since January 2005, many of them in off-Broadway political settings like Topeka.
And he reaps a full helping of love.
“How about a big Kansas welcome for Vice President Dick Cheney?” Representative Jim Ryun, a five-term Republican, says at a lunchtime fund-raiser on Thursday.
And a big Kansas welcome he gets: cheers, sustained applause, even some war whoops — yes, war whoops. Loving ones.
“Well, that warm welcome is almost enough to make me want to run for office again,” the vice president responds. “Almost.”
Mr. Cheney’s favorability ratings might be in an underground bunker, somewhere beneath the president’s (at 20 percent in the most recent New York Times poll). Critics deride him as a Prince of Darkness whose occasional odd episodes — swearing at a United States senator, shooting a friend in a hunting accident and then barely acknowledging it publicly — suggest a striking indifference to how he is perceived. Even admirers who laud his intellect and steadiness rarely mention anything about his electrifying rooms or people.
But then there are people like these, at the Capitol Plaza Hotel Manor Conference Center in Topeka.
“It’s just such a big thrill to see and hear this man,” says Marvin Smith, a farmer and former teacher.
Mr. Smith says most people he knows feel the same way, “except for a few of those peacemakers.” He means protesters, a smattering of whom are picketing down the street...."
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Could there be another explanation?
