Josh Kraushaar is getting a bit carried away in his analysis of Liz Cheney’s failed Senate campaign:

Her dropping out is a symbolic nail in the coffin to the politics of the Bush-Cheney administration, when foreign policy trumped all and aggressive tactics to combat Islamic extremism were initially greeted with public support.

As much as I would like to see the failure of Cheney’s pointless campaign as proof of this, it doesn’t make much sense to look at it this way. Kraushaar observes that Cheney barely mentioned foreign policy during her campaign, which is a reminder that she had virtually no meaningful policy disagreements with the incumbent. Even if she had tried to attack Enzi on foreign policy grounds, there are so few differences between them on these issues that there would be nothing for her to say. The main and fatal weakness of her campaign was that it had no reason to exist: the incumbent she was challenging was popular, he had a reliably conservative voting record, he wasn’t tainted by any scandal, and her only qualification for public office was that she had held a position in the Bush administration with responsibility for the region that saw its greatest errors and failures. If Cheney’s failed campaign has any significance beyond its implications for her own career, it demonstrates that Republican primaries can’t be won on a platform of nothing more than increased combativeness for its own sake. Voters are understandably unenthusiastic about campaigns that serve no purpose except to satisfy the ego of the politician, and that is true no matter what the person’s policy views happen to be.