Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney

This looks like solid evidence that vice presidential offspring and Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney's politics and personality were set in icy stone by the time she was college-age. Back then, as today, she had the Cheney combination of rock-solid Republican messaging and personal nastiness. Case in point: a 1988 op-ed she wrote for her college newspaper attacking the campus anti-apartheid movement

Cheney's basic argument followed Ronald Reagan's position: Divestment would be wrong because, as bad as apartheid was, she wrote:



It is fulfilling to express our moral outrage, but no responsible person would do so at the expense of the thousands of black workers employed in U.S. firms in South Africa.

Note that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress supported divestment, but what did they know about ending apartheid? Not as much as college student Liz Cheney, that's for sure! Then she threw in that personal Cheney touch:



Those eager to make such statements should also realize that, frankly, nobody's listening.

At the time Cheney claimed that nobody was listening, 155 colleges had fully or partially divested from South Africa. The United States Congress had not only passed a bill imposing sanctions against South Africa, but had overridden a veto by Reagan. Whatever was going on at Colorado College, very clearly people were listening to the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. And, ultimately, the South African government was paying attention to the broad movement of which the students at Colorado College were just a small part.

So history teaches us that in this, as in so many other things, Liz Cheney was wrong. Specifically, she was wrong effectively in defense of a brutal racist regime. And Cheney herself just had to make clear along the way that—like father, like daughter—her personality is as vicious as her politics.