Cheney stars as GOP fund-raiser

TOPEKA, Kansas — Grace Mosier lives with her mom and dad, goes to birthday parties, takes ballet classes and is just like a lot of other 6-year-old girls. Except that she happens to be obsessed with Dick Cheney.

"I really, really like him," says Grace, who can tell you what state the vice president was born in (Nebraska), where he went to grade school (College View, in Lincoln), and the names of his dogs (Dave and Jackson). She gets her fix of Cheney fun-facts by visiting the White House Web site for kids. It says there that his favorite teacher was Miss Duffield and that he used to run a company called Halliburton.

So when Cheney came to town Thursday, Grace was at Forbes Field, holding a little American flag and a sign that said, "Welcome, Mr. Vice President, pet Dave and Jackson for me." She watched him get off Air Force Two, step into a car and speed off to a fund-raiser.

It was, to say the least, a thrill. "Like a rock star coming to town," says Dene Mosier, Grace's mother. And while Cheney might be an unusual object of a 6-year-old's fixation, it is probably less unusual here, in the heart of Cheney Country.

The terrain consists of hotel ballrooms, military bases and private homes often deep in the reddest of red states like Kansas (where President Bush and Cheney won by 25 percentage points in 2004). As a general rule, people still love Bush in Cheney Country, much more so than in other locales. But the president can't be everywhere, so Cheney comes instead, exposing as he goes the durability and devotion of his party's base.

He is dispatched around the country — to Topeka last week, to Casper, Wyo., the week before, and to Wyoming, Mich., the week before that — to preside over events largely ignored by the national media but covered big-time by the local press. He raises a lot of cash for the Republican Party and its candidates — more than $40 million at 114 events since the 2004 election, much of it in off-Broadway political settings like Topeka.

And he reaps a full helping of love.

"How about a big Kansas welcome for Vice President Dick Cheney?" says Jim Ryun, the five-term Republican congressman at a lunchtime fund-raiser on Thursday.

And a big Kansas welcome he gets: cheers, sustained applause, even some war whoops — yes, war whoops. Loving ones.

"Well, that warm welcome is almost enough to make me want to run for office again," the vice president responds. "Almost."