Daddy's girl: instead of offering genuine insight on how she reconciles her politics with her life, Mary Cheney uses her memoir to snipe at girly-man Democrats.

Flying home from a hunting trip in the summer of 2000, Dick Cheney asked his daughter Mary, "What do you think about me running for vice president?" In her new memoir, Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life (Threshold Editions, $25), Mary Cheney remembers that her father's remark "caught me so off-guard that at first I thought he was kidding."

Something similar happened to me when I read this anecdote. Mary Cheney's tone struck me as so disingenuous that I wondered whom she thought she was kidding. That was just the beginning of this book's mind-numbing string of implausibilities. "My dad said that he wanted to be very sure that the governor had fully considered the downside of choosing him. He wanted the opportunity to lay out the case against himself." Thus: proof that the notoriously secretive and calculating Cheney "can be totally candid, even when it's not in his own interest to do so, a trait that makes him pretty unusual in politics."

From its dubious opening scene to its sinister closing line, Now It's My Turn offers a banal yet chilling account of Mary Cheney's work on her father's campaigns in 2000 and 2004. There is only one reason her experience is of interest to anyone: She is a lesbian. Why did that matter? Because the conflict between Dick Cheney's archconservatism and his moderate stance on same-sex marriage piqued the moral curiosity of observers who wondered how he rationalized this uncharacteristically progressive position--and how his daughter rationalized working for a presidential candidate who used gay-baiting to court voters.

Yet on the evidence of her memoir, Mary Cheney is burdened by no such curiosity. Though she considered quitting the campaign when President Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, she says she stuck it out principally because "I love my dad. He is a man of intelligence, integrity, wisdom, and character." Here, as throughout Cheney's memoir, clan loyalty substitutes for political conviction.

She is contemptuous in recounting the third presidential debate, when moderator Bob Schieffer asked, "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" John Kerry answered, "We're all God's children, Bob, and I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as."

Mary Cheney writes that she felt "targeted" by Kerry's awkward remark even though she did not clearly understand why he mentioned her: "Whatever the reason, I was furious.... I turned toward the TV and said, 'You son of a bitch.'" After the debate, her mother Lynne's public response, "This is not a good man--what a cheap and tawdry political trick," was widely quoted. According to Mary, those remarks were tame compared with her mother's private response: "This is a man with a dark hole in his soul. He can have all the fake suntans and manicures he wants ..." [referring to Kerry's spa stops during the campaign] "but deep down inside, he's rotten."

In this situation, it seems Mrs. Cheney might have been able to find a better strategy for defending her gay daughter than harping on John Kerry for being faggy. Then again, routing effeminacy seems to be a favorite Cheney family sport.

Mary writes of a "popular video on the Internet" showing John Edwards "prepping his hair for a television interview," sniping that "I had a tough time imagining any serious candidate for national office spending that much time worrying about his hair."

The author concludes her book by describing the Bush-Cheney victory party in 2004, in language upped from an essay by a pert fifth-grader: "I was so happy and excited that we'd won, that 18 months of hard work had paid off, and that Dad and President Bush had been reelected, but I was also sad that the campaign was over." Mary's partner, Heather Poe, hated to appear onstage with the family--"too many cameras," Cheney offers--"but she understood how important it was to me, so she smiled and walked out with me, a gesture I greatly appreciated."

Cheney also avers that she's done campaigning: "Since Dad's made it very clear that he won't be running for office again, the 2004 presidential campaign was my last campaign as well."

Then, aider a triple-spaced paragraph jump, she adds, "Unless, of course, someone talks Dad into heading up another search committee."