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Lynne Cheney No Fan Of Hillary Clinton

Lynne Cheney says she would be uncomfortable with Hillary Rodham Clinton as president - and wishes the Democratic front-runner were more like her own husband.

"I'm certainly not going to be a supporter of Mrs. Clinton's and I have been troubled by the fact that you can't know what sort of president she would be, particularly on national security," Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, said in an interview with The Associated Press Wednesday.

"It makes me uncomfortable," she said. "I kind of like politicians that are more in the Dick Cheney mold, who say what they mean and mean what they say."

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer countered that the New York senator's campaign wasn't counting on Mrs. Cheney's vote, "considering that Senator Clinton will reverse the failed Bush-Cheney policies, especially in Iraq."

The vice president's wife reflects on her husband's character in her latest book, "Blue Skies, No Fences," a memoir about her youth in Wyoming. In the book, she details life on the Plains and in the Casper high school she and her husband attended.

She describes her first impression of him as "this smart, great-looking guy I sat next to in chemistry class." Now 66, she writes about their first date - he asked her to a formal dance in 1958 - and how much her mother liked him.

"He didn't talk a lot, but it wasn't hard to get him involved in a real conversation and feel that he was comfortable with it," she writes.

She also writes about her family's ancestors, tracing her roots along with her husband's. In talking about her book, she describes the era she writes about most - the late 1940s after World War II and the 1950s - as a simpler, more confident time.

"Part of what gave us confidence in the 1950s was we didn't understand the threat that lay ahead," she said. "Now I think, at least I hope we are, more cognizant of the threats that face us. We need to be aware that there are people out there who want to destroy us and destroy our way of life."

In that vein, she says the Bush administration's legacy will be in its efforts to protect the country after terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

"They've done the most important thing that leaders can do, which is keep the country safe and secure," she said.

She says she becomes "impatient" with the Iraqi government in its attempts to bring stability to that nation. But she says she becomes more patient when she looks back at our own history.

The Battle of Yorktown, the final major battle of the Revolutionary War, was won in 1781, she notes, and it took several years after that for the country to form a constitutional government.

"I think people are like me, you know, they are impatient, they want our troops to come home, we all want that," she said. "But of course if you look at the situation in detail you understand that's simply not possible right now."

She says she isn't sure what she and her husband will do after he leaves office. They plan to have a house in Virginia and keep their home in Wyoming. Cheney - former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute - says she will continue to write, and Dick Cheney might too.

Might she run for office? She said it's "hard to see the path that would take me that way."

"We've been through transitions like this many times before and honestly there's no sense trying to predict," she said.

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