The memory of the 2004 presidential re-election campaign remains long and vivid for former Vice President Dick Cheney, who recalled that he was unimpressed and even disgusted with challengers John Kerry and running mate John Edwards.
Reflecting on Kerry’s bid in a new oral history project from Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, the former veep called it a “no-class operation,” especially for targeting Cheney’s lesbian daughter in a debate over same-sex marriage.
And he slapped Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, as a “scumbag” for fathering a child out of wedlock.
“It turned out I was righter than I knew, given what was going on in the campaign everybody found out later,” said Cheney, who remains influential in conservative and foreign policy circles. An earlier version of that quote was clarified by the Center after reviewing the video interview. His comments, and those of many others involved in the 2004 race, are being unveiled in a new oral history project from the Center’s Collective Memory Project. It focused on the race in which Kerry was expected to beat President George W. Bush and Cheney, but fell short.
Should former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush win the Republican nomination, Cheney’s review of the 2000 campaign provides an avenue to hit Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Part of our strategy was to tie [Al] Gore to [Bill] Clinton as closely as we could because at that point Bill Clinton was carrying a few negatives — you could put it in those terms — after his time in office,” Cheney said.
His wife even helped coin one of the campaign’s mottos to attack Gore — lifted from a 1992 Gore speech: “It’s time for them to go.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
