Wednesday, October 17, 2007

What are we to make of this?

Lynne Cheney divulges that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are eighth cousins.


Mrs. Cheney told MSNBC on Tuesday that it was 'an amazing American story that one ancestor ... could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths.'


Well, let's not pee ourselves about it, they're both career politicians. But nonetheless, yes, it's mildly interesting.


The common ancestor was Mareen Devall, who the Chicago Sun-Times said was a 17th century immigrant from France.

Mrs. Cheney said she discovered the link through family research for her new book, 'Blue Skies, No Fences,' about growing up in Wyoming.



Once again, mildly interesting, the sort of amusing tidbit one might expect from, say, an unpoliticized, slightly clueless hobbyist spouse of an elected official. However, this comes not from Bess Truman or Marilyn Quayle but from Lynne Cheney, known all around as a sharper kind of cookie, and one who certainly checked with Dick before tossing said tidbit out. That makes this announcement, timed as it is during early campaign season, rather more interesting.

The fact that this bit of trivia has already been added and referenced (by somebody) on Barack Obama's Wikipedia page is even more interesting than that. We must assume a political motivation for a repeated emphasis on such a pointless and certainly unsolicited fact -- we haven't viewed the interview yet but we can scarcely imagine anyone asking, "By the way, Dick and Barack...related?" -- but what could it be?

There's little secret that the GOP, for whatever reason, desperately wants Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. (Doubtless, like a one-joke standup comic, they have enough leftover material from Bill's presidency to last them years into the future.) Could there be a strategy to undermine Obama's assumed African-American support by blood-linking him to one of the United States' most thoroughly white citizens? (You don't get more Wonderbread-and-Miracle-Whip than Dick.) Or conversely, are they hoping to season Cheney's flavorless ethnicity? Or perhaps they're trying to make the best of Cheney's painfully low popularity by sharing his curse with Democrats? (Perhaps next they'll announce that John Edwards is Donald Rumsfeld's nephew.)

Oh, all this is terribly far-fetched, of course, we're merely amusing ourselves, or more accurately distracting ourselves from a bleaker period of pessimism than usual. And yet what shall we make of this? Who are the Republicans? What do they want? Why write about growing up in Wyoming at all? Shall our nation endure? We'll ponder it.

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