The frenzy of activity reflects only the public side of the PR blitz. The Cheney recovery tour

Dick and Liz Cheney have been impossible to miss in recent weeks, sparring with Democrats and Rand Paul over the latest mess in Iraq, making the rounds on Fox News and launching a group to reassert the case for their hawkish brand of foreign policy.

But the frenzy of activity reflects only the public side of the father-daughter duo’s PR blitz of late. In a series of private meetings and back-channel discussions, the Cheneys have quietly been working to repair their relationship with a Republican establishment of which they’d been card-carrying members for decades — but that was strained by Liz Cheney’s ill-fated Senate bid in Wyoming last year. And if the charm offensive helps lay the groundwork for her to run for public office again someday, all the better.


Top GOP operatives and former Reagan and Bush officials were invited to a friendly, off-the-record dinner with the former vice president recently at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington that several attendees said was billed as a “fence-mending’’ affair. The guest list included Republicans who backed incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi against Liz Cheney last year. The former vice president warmly greeted guests and talked about his latest political activities but steered clear of last year’s acrimonious primary, several people said.

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Earlier this spring, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, attended conservative writer George Will’s annual spring baseball soiree at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., to fete the Washington Nationals’ opening game. One attendee said it was the first time in years that the former vice president and his wife had gone to the exclusive party. As Cheney worked the room, another person there said, he recalled throwing out the first pitch for the Nationals in 2006, joking that the ball bounced to home plate.

Dick and Liz Cheney have also reached out to some of Enzi’s key supporters, though not the senator himself. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, vice chairman of the party’s Senate campaign arm, said he’s spoken to Liz Cheney a “number” of times since she abandoned her bid in January, and told her she has “a lot to offer the party.” And Dick Cheney has “offered to be helpful” in Senate races that could tip the majority this fall, the senator said.

“They are part of the team,” Portman, a longtime friend of the Cheneys, said in an interview.

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While the Cheneys have made progress fixing things with the party, the situation between Liz and her sister Mary is less clear. Mary Cheney, who is gay, and her wife, Heather Poe, publicly rebuked Liz Cheney for opposing same-sex marriage in her campaign, saying she was “dead wrong.”

When a POLITICO reporter told Mary Cheney he heard that she and her sister had “buried the hatchet,” she initially responded, “Curious who told you that.” Pressed to elaborate, she wrote that her response was “something I tend to ask whenever I get a vague [question] like ‘someone told me’ and it is regards to me or my family.” She did not comment further.

Liz Cheney also declined to be interviewed. But a person close to the Cheneys denied that they were strategically moving to rebuild ties with the party establishment, saying, for instance, that the dinner in Washington in late May was an affair the vice president regularly attends when he is in town.

“Both Liz and the VP have longstanding relationships with many folks involved in GOP politics and policy, and they never have felt it necessary to ‘mend fences,’” this person said, adding that the elder Cheney “regularly attends dinners with groups he has known for his 40 years in Washington.”

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Still, the Cheneys have said little about their private outreach efforts. Attendees at the late May dinner were reluctant to give details, saying they were urged not to speak about the gathering publicly.

The hobnobbing with Washington insiders marks an abrupt shift from Liz Cheney’s short-lived Wyoming Senate campaign last year against Enzi, a 17-year Senate veteran. Cheney railed on Republicans in Washington as the “problem,” calling them defenders of the “status quo” who were hurting the cause of true conservatives like herself.

“The Washington establishment is doing all it can to try to stop us,” the younger Cheney said in a letter to donors in December, shortly before dropping out of the race. “You and I know that protecting incumbents won’t protect our freedom.”

Cheney abandoned her bid after five months, citing “serious health issues” with one of her five kids.

Now the Cheneys are back in force. The two have agreed to headline fundraisers for the Republican National Committee in the coming months. They’ve just announced a new foreign policy organization to trumpet their aggressive foreign policy views, which are in line with the mainstream of the GOP establishment.

And Liz Cheney has returned as a regular pundit on Fox News, using the prominent platform to criticize President Barack Obama and reengage in the national debate.

On July 14, Dick, Lynne and Liz Cheney will be the marquee names at a POLITICO Playbook lunch event at the Mayflower Hotel.

“It seems to me they are little more approachable than they have been,” said one GOP senator, who asked not to be named to speak candidly of the Cheneys.

People close to the Cheneys say they hope to move beyond last year’s fray and pivot back to an issue that defines their brand: national security. But several of Liz Cheney’s friends also say she could well make another bid for elected office.

“I have no doubt that if Liz Cheney’s ambition is to be a senator, governor or member of Congress, she’s going to achieve that ambition,” said Steve Schmidt, a former senior aide to the vice president and personal friend of Liz Cheney’s. “She’s clearly going to run in Wyoming, and at some point, it’s going to be an open seat or there will be an opportunity to run. … And I just think that she will be a stronger candidate.”

The Cheneys don’t appear to be doing nearly as much in Wyoming to smooth over any hard feelings from the campaign.

While Liz Cheney still lives in the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home that she and her husband, Phil Perry, purchased in 2012, she has not been the heavy presence in the state’s political circles that she was during the campaign or in the run-up to her July 2013 announcement, according to lawmakers and operatives in the state. She had relocated to the state from McLean, Virginia.

Both of the state’s U.S. senators — Enzi and John Barrasso — as well as Wyoming’s lone House member, Cynthia Lummis, said they haven’t heard from the Cheneys since January.

“If I had been advising her, I would have suggested that she would start with a different race,” said Lummis, who would have run for the Senate had Enzi announced his retirement. “Wyoming people like to see people earn their spurs.”

“Since she pulled out of the race, I have not talked to her,” Lummis said. “There were some tensions [during the race] that developed among some close friendships in Wyoming that surprised me. But I never experienced that personally.”

Still, none of the three say they harbor any grudges against either Cheney. Lummis called Liz Cheney “absolutely fabulous.” Enzi denied there was any discord even during the short campaign, even though Republicans in Washington were actively trying to prop up his candidacy and thwart Cheney’s bid.

“‘For me, it wasn’t at all,” he said in an interview when asked how tense that period was. He seemed unconcerned that the Cheneys had not reached out.

Asked if he thought Liz Cheney could still have a prominent role in the party, Enzi demurred.

“That’s not up to me,” Enzi said. “I’m not busy investigating that.”

Cheney spokeswoman Kara Ahern said the ex-candidate has spent the “last six months focused on her family and kids in the aftermath of health issues that caused her to leave the race. She was honored to be a candidate and is now focused on doing all she can to help restore American strength, security and power.”

Indeed, the two Cheneys now are promoting their new group — the Alliance for a Strong America — aimed at reversing the “dangerous” positions of the Obama administration on foreign policy.

“The policies of the last six years have left us diminished and weakened,” the 73-year-old Dick Cheney, donning a cowboy hat and a brown vest, said in a video announcing the group. Next to him was Liz Cheney, 47, a University of Chicago-educated lawyer and former senior State Department official.

Though it’s billed as an initiative to challenge the Obama administration’s foreign policy, the group also has the hallmarks of a counterweight to Sen. Paul, whose calls for a less aggressive U.S. role overseas has taken a foothold in many GOP quarters. The former vice president has repeatedly labeled the libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky an “isolationist.”

“Cheney should answer for his advocacy of bailouts for Wall Street, a failed foreign policy that has made America weaker and policies that paved the way for two terms of President Obama before anybody allows Cheney to speak for Republicans,” a senior aide to Paul responded.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), whose national security views align with those of the Cheneys, welcomes the former vice president and his daughter back to the debate.

“That’s still the heart and soul of the party: We are the party that will effectively, aggressively defend the country,” Graham said.

By and large, most Republicans in Washington seem willing to forget Cheney’s ill-fated effort to target a well-liked member of the clan.

“They have both been heroic people to this country,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) of the Cheneys. “But I thought it was a real mistake to go against a really good senator like Sen. Enzi.”

Mary Matalin, a close friend and confidante of the Cheneys, said the race against Enzi was challenging for the family, but it “wasn’t their first rodeo.”

“All went in with an expectation that the contest and the issue contrasts would not proceed without the confrontation it deserved,” Matalin said. “She also was focused on reorienting the family in their new home.”

Matalin added: “Regrouping after primaries is SOP,” referring to “standard operating procedure.”

Indeed, the small gestures from the Cheneys in recent months seem to be working with Republicans in Washington.

After the former vice president made some warm remarks about Marco Rubio recently, the Republican senator from Florida sent him a personal note thanking him — and later gushed about both Cheneys.

“What he says is something I will always pay attention to,” Rubio said of the former vice president’s national security views.