The new torchbearers for the Republican party are two blondes with famous surnames - Cheney and McCain - and competing visions about how to revive American conservatism in the age of Barack Obama.
Liz Cheney, 42, the eldest daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, is contemplating a political career of her own now that her father’s White House years are over. “It’s an honourable profession and it’s something I may want to do, if I can persuade my five children to be my campaign staff,” she said in an interview.
Cheney, whose youngest child is only two, vigorously disputes the notion that the Republicans are as rudderless and stuck in the past as British conservatives were after the fall of Margaret Thatcher.
“We’re really in a pre-Thatcher moment,” she said. “If you look at what the Obama administration is doing economically, we may get to a point where we have the American equivalent of British socialism in the 1970s.
“The Obama administration is moving so far left on economic issues, there may be some very direct parallels between the circumstances which allowed Margaret Thatcher to come to power and put Britain on the track to have a successful economy.”
Cheney scored a notable victory last week when she dived into the controversy about whether the White House should release photographs of prisoner abuse by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was becoming “fashionable” to “side with the terrorists”, she said with steely clarity. The swipe was every bit as deadly as her father’s claim that Obama’s policies were making America less safe. To the fury of the left, Obama agreed soon afterwards to keep the pictures secret.
Cheney did not have long to savour the moment - an Australian television station broadcast some of the harrowing images last week - but she had made her mark.
“It is clear that the Cheneys will be active for years, even decades, to come as Liz profiles herself as the rising star of the party,” said Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of a critical book on neoconservatives.
In the opposite corner is Meghan McCain, 24, the feisty, politically moderate blogger and daughter of Senator John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate. She told Dick Cheney: “You’ve had your eight years - go away.”
While Meghan McCain is fast becoming a media celebrity for her outspoken views in support of gay marriage, stem-cell research and environmental causes, she is short of admirers among the party faithful. Her own father admitted as much when asked whether she was a “future maverick in training”.
“Maybe, maybe,” John McCain laughed.
In contrast, Cheney, a former State Department official, is a conservative blue-blood who is helping her father to write his memoirs. After years of jokes about being in a bunker in an “undisclosed location”, Cheney has taken to the airwaves to criticise Obama.
His daughter insists it is not about defending his legacy. “It would be easy for my dad to spend time with his grandkids fishing in Wyoming. He’s doing it because he cares for his country. He thinks there is an obligation to speak out.”
Liz Cheney hopes that Obama might not be the invincible president she feared. “When Barack Obama was sworn in, many Republicans felt we might be in the wilderness for some time, but while he’s clearly a brilliant campaigner, he has not been a brilliant leader and he has moved us much further to the left than the nation expected,” she said.
The problem is finding a charismatic Republican who can challenge Obama. Nicole Wallace, a former adviser to John McCain’s campaign, wrote that the party should keep in minds the words of the Bonnie Tyler song: “I need a hero”.
She asked: “How about General Petraeus? How about Gary Sinise?” Sinise is the star of the television drama CSI: New York. He has visited American troops in Iraq and attended the Republican party convention last summer.
“He’s part of an underground group of conservatives in Hollywood - an act of bravery in itself,” Wallace wrote. “The natural strengths that an actor brings to politics would come in handy to anyone going up against Obama in 2012.”
Petraeus, she admitted, had not shown any interest in running, but might reconsider if he thought his legacy in Iraq was being undermined by Obama.
That is unlikely, according to Petraeus’s friends. He is politically ambitious, they say, but realises he would have a greater chance of success in 2016.
Another potential moderate contender, Governor Jon Huntsman of Utah, was named by Obama yesterday as US ambassador to China. Huntsman, 49, a former Mormon missionary in Taiwan, is fluent in Mandarin.
The Republican party is also facing a demographic time-bomb, given its poor levels of support among Hispanics, African-Americans and women. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s former campaign manager, said in a speech at recently: “[Support] is near-extinct in many ways in the northeast, it is extinct in many ways on the west coast, and it is endangered in the mountain west, increasingly endangered in the southwest . . . it is a shrinking entity.”
Sarah Palin, 45, the governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, remains in the wings. With the continuing drama over the bust-up between her teenage daughter Bristol and the father of her baby - and the arrest of the baby's other grandmother for drug dealing - many Republicans say she had her chance and fluffed it.
Palin has secured a publishing contract with HarperCollins for her memoirs with the help of the Washington super-lawyer Robert Barnett, who brokered Tony Blair and Obama’s multi-million-dollar deals. She still has the appetite for power and the name recognition.
Liz Cheney is more concerned to keep the party ideology alive while the long quest for a new Thatcher or Ronald Reagan continues.
“There’s all this commentary about who’s up or down and who are the heirs of the party,” she said. “People are hungry for leadership, but at the end of the day, it will be about substance.”
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