Dick Cheney rides to the (congressional) rescue
It is a measure of how concerned Republicans are about the recent House special election losses in Illinois and Louisiana that Dick Cheney will be traveling to Mississippi next week to participate in the get-out-the-vote effort for Greg Davis.
Davis, the Republican mayor of Southaven, Miss., is in a tough fight against Democrat Travis Childers, the Prentiss County chancery clerk, in the Tuesday special-election runoff vote to succeed former Rep. Roger Wicker in the state's 1st Congressional District.
"This seat is a very important one," Cheney told Mississippi radio host Paul Gallow this morning ahead of next week's trip. "It's been in conservative hands for a long time, and we'd hate to see the liberals gain control."
Note that Cheney didn't say "Republican hands" and "Democrats."
After losing the House majority in 2006, Republicans have been spooked by continued losses this year in Illinois, where Bill Foster won the seat long held by former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and in Louisiana, where Don Cazayoux took a seat that had been Republican since 1975.
As a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat, Childers has a profile similar to Cazayoux, who won last week despite Republican efforts to tie him to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Republicans are trying to paint Childers, who came within several hundred votes of an outright majority in the six-candidate special election last month, with the same brush.
-- Matthew Hay Brown
Matthew Hay Brown writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau.
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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I wonder when the remaining Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse will arrive there?
Posted by: Franky | May 09, 2008 at 03:33 PM
I call them the "Three Horses' Asses of the Apocalypse".
Posted by: JOHN DICKERSON | May 10, 2008 at 07:25 PM