In recent years, voters have begun to pay attention to candidates' wives in ways they never have before. Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore certainly have received greater scrutiny, and that is sure to be the case this time with Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney. Today I would like to focus briefly on Lynne Cheney, wife of vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney.
She has been called a cultural activist and a conservative thinker because of her writings and her place at the table of CNN's "Crossfire." Her Ph.D. in English literature is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Presidents Reagan and Bush.
Before her tenure at the NEH, many criticized the agency for funding left-wing seminars and esoteric projects for professors. When Mrs. Cheney was head of the NEH, she changed its direction and generated some controversy. Under Cheney, the NEH defunded a PBS series entitled "The Africans." She argued that the TV series was "an anti-Western diatribe." Instead, she funded Ken Burn's documentary "The Civil War." She also funded efforts to improve college teaching. And at a time when colleges were dumbing down their graduation requirements, she was responsible for the document "50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students."
After she left the NEH, she wrote Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Country Have Stopped Making Sense. It was an indictment of the growing philosophical trend of postmodernism with its belief that there is no truth (absolute or otherwise). She has also been a critic of multiculturalism and other intellectual fads. She founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to bring pressure on colleges that adopt political correctness or dumb down their curricula.
If the Republicans are elected in November, I suspect we will be hearing a lot more from Lynne Cheney. Of course, that will probably be true even if they are defeated.
I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.