Liz Cheney or Meghan McCain?

The daughters of two famous Republican politicians have been getting some serious face time in the media lately. Meghan McCain has a head start, thanks to her blog, her father's campaign for the presidency last year and a set of beliefs which the Obama-loving drive-by media finds very close to their own. So she has been given a wealth of video footage and column inches to get out her message that even her father's GOP is still not sufficiently Democrat Lite to successfully suck up to the generation she assumes to speak for.

McCain The Daughter has gotten so much media exposure that she's starting to wear thin, even on the mellow nerves of crunchy cons, conservatives who are okay with some of the ways of liberalism. Meghan's ways, especially her attitudes about sex, are not those aspects of liberalism that the crunchies are comfortable with. Rod Dreher, in his latest BeliefNet blog post, calls her "moronic" and "a useful idiot for the media left."

On the other side of the Republican coin, there is Liz Cheney, whom Washington Whispers blogger Paul Bedard calls "the hottest Republican property out there." A growing number of conservatives including her close friends are pushing Liz Cheney to run for public office.

Bedard doesn't hold back on the praise for the elder Cheney daughter:

A forceful defender of the [Bush] administration and her dad, Liz Cheney has been appearing on TV with greater regularity. She brings to the screen a combination of her dad's steely focus and her mom's softer touch. "It's a two-fer. She comes off a bit better than he does sometimes," a conservative consultant said.

Allahpundit captured a fine example of that combination showing Liz Cheney easily pushing Lawrence O'Donnell into meltdown. In all fairness, however, O'Donnell has repeatedly proven that it's not that difficult a feat to accomplish.

Dick Cheney's daughter also did a fine job of pwning another O'Donnell - MSDNC's Nora - in a televised appearance late last month. On the same network's Morning Joe program, Liz reduced the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal columnist Eugene Robinson to sputtering, stuttering ineffectiveness.

Without question, Liz Cheney has inherited her father's ability to drive the Left into derangement mode, a characteristic both share with Alaska's Sarah Palin. On Gov. Palin, Megahn McCain has consistently said, "No comment," when the question inevitably comes up in interviews. She has obviously been admonished by her father not to directly attack his former running mate. But that hasn't stopped Megahn from going after the governor's daughter Bristol. Liz Cheney, on the other hand, says Sarah Palin is "terrific."

So the answer to the question posed by the title of this post is "Liz Cheney." It's a no-brainer. Liz Cheney, like the grown-up she is, calmly and effectively makes her argument, while Meghan McCain, in Rod Dreher's words, is "making a national fool of herself." The future of the GOP is found not in the valley girl foolishness of Meghan McCain, but rather in the clear-headed reasoning of Liz Cheney. 

Update: More on Liz Cheney from Rush here. Meanwhile, Carlos Echevarria suggests an interesting ticket for 2012.

- JP