A New York Times article about a possible U.S. Senate run by Liz Cheney incudes this passage: "Ms. Cheney, the mother of five school-age children, has become ubiquitous, appearing many times in communities over 300 miles from home."
This struck me as faintly disapproving verging on sexist, as if the Times reporter was saying, "shouldn't she be home with her children?" I can't recall a similar formulation being used by the Times to describe campaigning by a male politician with school-age children.
Similarly, the article says, "Ms. Cheney, a State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush, is a pugnacious partisan and has called President Obama 'the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office.'"
Is there such a thing as a non-pugnacious partisan? The Times obituary of congressman Henry Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, described him as "pugnacious and partisan." The "pugnacious partisan" phrase also cropped up in a 1960 Times profile of a Democrat who chaired the House agriculture committee, Harold Dunbar Cooley. But Republican readers and even thoughtful independents will likely wonder whether if Ms. Cheney were a Democrat the Times would be describing her as a "pugnacious partisan" or just as "principled."
If the Times is going to describe Ms. Cheney as a pugnacious partisan, it would be nice to have some evidence other than merely the description of Mr. Obama as "the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office." Does the Times have an alternative candidate for that distinction? Perhaps one could make a case for Jefferson, in the Gordon Wood sense of radical. Either Roosevelt? Woodrow Wilson?