It turns out that Vice President Dick Cheney’s second campaign visit to Idaho in three months will be different from the first – it won’t be a fundraiser, and it won’t be for any particular candidate. Instead, Cheney will fly briefly into the Coeur d’Alene Airport for an “Idaho Victory Rally” next Thursday afternoon to rally a group of several hundred invited Republicans. He’ll drop in for similar “victory rallies” next week in Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. “He’s just there to sort of rally the troops and lend whatever support he can,” Megan McGinn, Cheney’s deputy press secretary, told me last night.

North Idaho Republicans are thrilled, but so are Idaho Democrats – who say the increasing national Republican focus on Idaho is a sign that Democrats are no longer irrelevant in this state long dominated by the GOP. “In a sense, Democrats have already won, because Republicans have never had to work so hard for an election in recent memory,” said Idaho Democratic Party spokesman Chuck Oxley. “It’s just absolutely unprecedented. … You don’t send a vice president out to a state like Idaho unless you’re really afraid.”

You can read the full story in today’s Spokesman-Review.

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