The big political story of the week was the selection of Dick Cheney to be George Bush's running mate. A large number of Americans didn't know who Cheney was, even if he played a prominent part in winning the Gulf War in 1991 from his Pentagon office.
The late-night chat comedians have been merciless about Cheney's medical history of three heart attacks and a quadruple bypass. Jay Leno joked that instead of Air Force Two, Cheney will travel in Ambulance Two. "Actually this is very smart," Leno went on. "This is what Republicans are calling a Wizard of Oz ticket. You see Cheney needs a heart and Bush needs a brain."
But Cheney's wife, Lynne, is very well known indeed as a prominent guardian of the country's conservative values.
She also cannot stand Hillary Clinton. "What really drives me crazy is when Hillary acts like the happy wife," she told a recent seminar on the First Lady. "Walking hand in hand off the helicopter together at critical moments. It is just so distressing to me."
Lynne Cheney at 58 certainly seems the happy wife after 36 years of marriage to the man who once got her elected at their Casper, Wyoming, high school as the "homecoming queen" for the football team which he captained. Lynn also was a baton-twirling champion when she was a majorette.
But that was then. Now she has built up a reputation as an archconservative defending traditional cultural values and as a scourge of political correctness in academia.
Under Presidents Reagan and Bush she was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and refused to give aid to cultural projects which she saw as too left-wing.
She denounced a nine-hour television series on "The Africans" as "an anti-western diatribe". She helped to bring in the National History Standards for schools but later campaigned against how they were implemented, complaining that students would "learn more about Joseph McCarthy than George Washington, more about Indian Chief Speckled Snake than Thomas Edison".
She turned down an application for a $650,000 grant from a group of scholars and film-makers who wanted to make two films about Christopher Columbus. She objected to the discoverer of America being accused of genocide against the Indians.
If George Bush wins in November she could yet end up as Secretary of Education while her husband serves as Vice-President. Bush this week called her "a woman of many accomplishments . . . an incredibly important member of this team".
Academia would tremble at the prospect of education being led by the woman who has called university professors "a credentialled elite".
She, in turn, has been described as "the leading policy assassin for right-wing cultural warriors".
She is unrepentant, believing that "the academy has always been to the left in my lifetime". But she sees a difference in the attitude of professors today. "When I was in college, I was never expected just to take their [the professors'] viewpoints." Now she fears that the universities are turning out a generation of "ignoramuses".
In 1996 she continued her attack on academia with her book Telling The Truth: Why our culture and our country have stopped making sense and what we can do about it. The universities, she argued, have long since abandoned ultimate truth in favour of relativism.
She wrote her thesis on the effect of Immanuel Kant's philosophy on the poetry of Matthew Arnold and is still influenced by the 19th century English poet. She points to Arnold's belief that those who study the humanities should "learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world".
Lynne Cheney is also a skilled TV interviewer and debater whom I used to watch on Sunday nights, not realising she was wife of the man who helped win the Gulf War. But then CNN dropped her programme.
I also did not realise that she has written novels. One called The Body Politic is a Washington political thriller she wrote in 1988 with Victor Gold. It has an interesting plot made even more fascinating by the events of this week.
It is about a 59-year-old vice-president (Dick Cheney is 59) who dies of a heart attack (Dick Cheney has had three) in the arms of a woman TV reporter.
This death by "carnal arrest" occurs in the middle of an election campaign so the White House staff decides to conceal it temporarily from the public.
The narrator in the novel has a dim view of the office of vice-president to which Dick Cheney now aspires. "For a Type A overachiever, the vice-presidency is the worst kind of career move," the narrator says - or is it Lynne writes?
"Under the constitution the only thing the job calls for is waiting: waiting for the President to die or be impeached; waiting for the Senate to wind up in a tie vote so the vice-president can break it. That's all the vice-presidency is about - waiting. Everything else is make-work."
Well, at least Dick knows what's ahead if the Bush-Cheney ticket makes it to the White House.
By the way, the novel ends with the vice-president being succeeded by - his wife.