I suspect that the Bush campaign, desperate to find a way to distract attention away from some of Bush’s more egregious mistakes last night, have had to settle on trivia as their primary talking point from last night: Kerry’s reference to Dick Cheney’s gay daughter. It’s hardly been 12 hours and this has already received far more attention than it deserves.
Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice President Cheney, accused John F. Kerry on Wednesday night of “a cheap and tawdry political trick” and said he “is not a good man” after he brought up their daughter’s homosexuality at the final presidential debate.
Mary Cheney, one of the vice president’s two daughters and an official of the Bush-Cheney campaign, has been open about her lesbian status. The candidates were asked if they believe homosexuality is a choice, and President Bush did not mention Mary Cheney. Then Kerry said, “If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”
First of all, Kerry was simply humanizing the question. He wasn’t “outing” anyone; Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation has never been a secret. What’s so tawdry about this? The question was about whether being gay is a choice. Bush wouldn’t answer either way and Kerry was putting a human face — whom Bush obviously knows — on an important societal question. There wasn’t anything “cheap” about it.
Indeed, just last week in the VP debate, in a question about gay marriage, John Edwards brought up the fact that the Cheneys have a gay daughter. The vice president thanked him for his comments and said he “appreciate[s] that very much.”
Moreover, let’s go back and look at the transcript from Aug. 24, at a town-hall meeting the Cheneys attended in Davenport, Iowa.
Question: … I would like to know, sir, from your heart — I don’t want to know what your advisors say, or even what your top advisor thinks — but I need to know what do you think about homosexual marriages.
Cheney: Well, the question has come up obviously in the past with respect to the question of gay marriage. Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue that our family is very familiar with.
Is Lynne Cheney prepared to say that this, too, was a “cheap and tawdry political trick”? The VP did the same thing Kerry did last night — he took a question that did not directly relate to Mary Cheney, but mentioned her as a way to put a human face on a controversial issue. It wasn’t underhanded when Dick Cheney said this in Iowa, just as it wasn’t underhanded for Kerry last night in Tempe.
If this is the best the Republicans can come up with to try and downplay Kerry’s victory last night, they’ll have to do better.