President Barack Obama should have been clearer about what health care plans would be discontinued as part of the Affordable Care Act implementation, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Sunday. 
 
 Appearing on ABC's "This Week," the New York Democrat offered a stirring defense of the law, if not the administration’s implementation efforts. 
 
 “He should have just been more specific,” Gillibrand said. “The point is, if you are being offered a terrible health care plan that the minute you get sick you have to go into bankruptcy, those plans should never be offered, he should have just been specific.” 
 
 (Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA) 
 
 Yet when asked why 39 House Democrats voted with Republicans to force a legislative fix to legalize existing health care plans, Gillibrand said: “They’re just responding to the worries of their constituents.” 
 
 Read more about: Kirsten Gillibrand, Obamacare ||||| Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney says she won’t change her position against gay marriage just because her sister Mary is married to a woman. 
 
 “I love Mary very much, I love her family very much,” Liz Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday. “This is just an issue on which we disagree.” 
 
 Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is mounting a primary challenge to Republican Sen. Mike Enzi. She said that she remains opposed to a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage and that people should not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Yet marriage, she said, should be for heterosexual couples. 
 
 (PHOTOS: 10 fiery quotes from Liz Cheney) 
 
 “I believe in the traditional definition of marriage,” she said. 
 
 Read more about: Liz Cheney, Gay Marriage, Wyoming ||||| Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says Republicans must pick a governor or a former governor as its presidential nominee in 2016 to maintain a proper outsider ethos. 
 
 “I think its got to be an outsider, I think both the presidential and vice presidential nomination needs to be a former or current governor, people who have done successful things in their states, taken on big reforms, who are ready to move America forward,” Walker said during an interview aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” 
 
 Asked if that disqualifies Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, Walker, who is up for re-election in 2014, said yes. 
 
 (VIDEO: Sunday shows in 90 seconds) 
 
 “All good guys, but it’s got be somebody who is viewed as being exceptionally removed from Washington,” Walker said. 
 
 Read more about: GOP, Elections, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, 2016 Elections ||||| Photo 
 
 WASHINGTON — They were the towheaded sisters who tagged along on campaigns, polite and smiling, as their father rose through Wyoming and then Washington politics to become one of the most powerful men in the country. 
 
 “We were as close as sisters can be,” recalled Mary Cheney of her relationship with her older sister, Liz. 
 
 But now, a feud between the two has spilled into public view, involving social media, an angry same-sex spouse, a high-profile election and a father who feels uncomfortably caught between his two children. 
 
 The situation has deteriorated so much that the two sisters have not spoken since the summer, and the quarrel threatens to get in the way of something former Vice President Dick Cheney desperately wants — a United States Senate seat for Liz. 
 
 Things erupted on Sunday when Mary Cheney, a lesbian, and her wife were at home watching “Fox News Sunday” — their usual weekend ritual. Liz Cheney appeared on the show and said that she opposed same-sex marriage, describing it as “just an area where we disagree,” referring to her sister. Taken aback and hurt, Mary Cheney took to her Facebook page to blast back: “Liz — this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree you’re just wrong — and on the wrong side of history.” 
 
 Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com 
 
 But then Mary Cheney’s wife, Heather Poe, went further, touching on Liz Cheney’s relocation from Northern Virginia to Wyoming to seek office. (Liz Cheney is already battling accusations of carpetbagging in the race.) 
 
 “I can’t help but wonder how Liz would feel if as she moved from state to state, she discovered that her family was protected in one but not the other,” Ms. Poe wrote on her Facebook page. “Yes, Liz,” she added, “in fifteen states and the District of Columbia you are my sister-in-law.” 
 
 The feud reveals tensions not just within the family but in the Republican Party more broadly as it seeks to respond to both a changing America and an energized, fervently conservative base. 
 
 Indeed, while Liz Cheney seeks to make clear her opposition to same-sex marriage, her father more than a decade ago was able to embrace fairly moderate views on the subject, breaking publicly with President George W. Bush over Mr. Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He has gone further still since then, telling Barbara Walters in 2011, “I certainly don’t have any problem with” same-sex marriage. 
 
 But Ms. Cheney, in her bid to defeat Republican Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, is running to his right and seeking to capture conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Liz Cheney on Sunday declined to directly address the remarks from her sister and sister-in-law, but said in an email: “I love my sister and her family and have always tried to be compassionate towards them. I believe that is the Christian way to behave.” 
 
 People who have spoken to Liz Cheney say she is irritated that her sister is making their dispute public and believes it is hypocritical for Mary Cheney to take such a hard line now, given that she worked for the re-election of President Bush, an opponent of same-sex marriage. 
 
 The relationship between the two sisters used to be quite different. The daughters drew especially close when their father ran as Mr. Bush’s running mate in 2000 and eventually became a figure of great controversy and enormous power as vice president. After Mr. Cheney left office in 2009, politically bruised and physically ailing, the sisters, who lived 15 minutes apart in Washington’s tony Northern Virginia suburbs, would join their parents for a standing Sunday dinner at Liz’s house in McLean each week, along with their families, including Ms. Poe. 
 
 Mary Cheney, 44, said in a phone interview Sunday that she presumed her sister shared her father’s views on marriage, and that view was reinforced because Liz Cheney “was always very supportive” of her relationship with Ms. Poe and the couple’s two children. She learned otherwise in August when Liz Cheney declared, shortly after announcing her Senate candidacy, that she was opposed to same-sex marriage rights. Mary Cheney said it is now “impossible” for the sisters to reconcile as long as Liz Cheney maintains that position. 
 
 “What amazes me is that she says she’s running to be a new generation of leader,” Mary Cheney said, citing her 47-year-old sister’s slogan in her campaign against Mr. Enzi, 69. “I’m not sure how sticking to the positions of the last 20 or 30 years is the best way to do that.” 
 
 Mary Cheney said it was her wife’s idea for the couple to take to Facebook to respond to Liz’s televised remarks. Ms. Poe seemed especially hurt that her sister-in-law had acted so embracing toward them in private, and then took this public position. 
 
 “Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 — she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us,” Ms. Poe wrote. “To have her say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.” 
 
 In the interview, Mary Cheney, who is a longtime political consultant, said she would continue to raise the matter. Reminded by a reporter that such criticism could complicate her sister’s Senate campaign, Mary Cheney offered a clipped answer reminiscent of her father’s terse style. “O.K.,” she said, before letting silence fill the air. 
 
 It is not the substance of the issue that could hurt Liz Cheney in Wyoming — her opponent also opposes same-sex marriage. But the ugly family drama and questions about what Liz Cheney truly believes could reinforce questions about her authenticity in a place where many voters have met their politicians in person and are already skeptical of an outsider like Ms. Cheney, who has lived elsewhere for much of her life. Ms. Cheney’s first ad, which she released last week, was devoted entirely to emphasizing her family’s Wyoming roots. 
 
 Wyoming, a sprawling but sparsely populated state, has rarely seen such high-profile primaries, and this one has already featured an ugly Cheney family episode: After former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, a longtime friend of the family who served with Mr. Cheney in the state’s congressional delegation, fretted to The New York Times this summer about how Liz Cheney’s challenge of Mr. Enzi would be divisive among the state’s Republicans, Lynne Cheney, the sisters’ mother and Mr. Cheney’s wife, confronted him at a charity event and told him to “just shut up” — three times, Mr. Simpson claimed. When Lynne Cheney later said that the exchange never happened, Mr. Simpson called her denial “a damn baldfaced lie.” 
 
 The former vice president is active and visible in his daughter’s Senate bid and this Wednesday, he will join her in Denver for a fund-raiser to benefit her campaign. Early polls show Liz Cheney trailing Mr. Enzi, but her fund-raising since declaring her candidacy has been robust. 
 
 As for Mary Cheney, she said that when she gets together with her parents these days, they know which subjects not to bring up. “They come over for dinner and we don’t talk about Liz or the race,” she said. “There is so much more to talk about.” 
 
 The Cheneys have tried to be “as neutral as they can,” added Mary Cheney, who just returned from a pheasant hunting trip with her father in South Dakota. “My parents are stuck in an awful position.” 
 
 As for the coming holidays, Mary Cheney said that her parents will come to her and Ms. Poe’s Northern Virginia home for Thanksgiving and that she assumed her older sister would be in Wyoming. 
 
 At Christmas, the whole Cheney clan will head to the Jackson Hole area in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney now lives. But Mary Cheney said of her sister, “I will not be seeing her.” ||||| House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Sunday the grandfathering clause in the Affordable Care Act only applied to people who had plans in 2010, before President Barack Obama signed the law. 
 
 “If you had your plan before the enactment of the law in 2010, there is nothing in the law” that can remove it,” the California Democrat said on NBC's "Meet the Press." “You could (keep your plan), if you had your plan before the enactment of the law in 2010. Grandfathering is for those before” 2010.” 
 
 Pelosi, a chief architect of the law in the House, said Obama was correct to take responsibility for the troubled Obamacare rollout, but insisted there's nothing that needs to be fixed about the law. 
 
 “He is gracious and he is taking responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that there was anything in the law that said if you like what you had before 2010 you couldn’t keep it,” she said. “He took responsibility for the big picture… because that’s what people see.” 
 
 Read more about: Nancy Pelosi, Obamacare ||||| Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of the late President Lyndon Johnson, recalled on in an interview Sunday her family’s struggle moving into the White House after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. 
 
 “One night I heard my mother and father actually have raised voices. That was just not in their temperament,” she told host Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “My mother was saying, ‘No, Lyndon, we can’t. We just can’t.’ And my father was saying empathetically but firmly, ‘Bird, we have to… We have to move on Dec. 7 because that’s the date that’s convenient to Mrs. Kennedy and to the Secret Service.” 
 
 Johnson said at that point she didn’t realize the significance of that date in American history. “I didn’t understand that Dec. 7 was a date that would live in infamy for their generation. Nov. 22 had become that day for me.” 
 
 Read more about: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK, Luci Baines Johnson ||||| Most House Democrats who voted for the Obamacare fix bill last week were “insulating themselves against sound bites,” Assistant Democratic Leader Rep. James Clyburn said Sunday. 
 
 (VIDEO: Sunday shows in 90 seconds) 
 
 Thirty-nine House Democrats joined Republicans on Friday to pass a bill that allows insurance companies to continue selling plans that have been canceled under Obamacare. And the South Carolina congressman said that while many of them have “real concerns,” about 30 of them voted for the bill to protect themselves from the rhetoric surrounding the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act. 
 
 Many people saw the bill simply as a vote to allow people to keep their insurance plans, Clyburn said, and many lawmakers would land in hot water for voting against that. “The fact of the matter is, if you look at the second part of that bill, it allows insurance companies to continue selling what we know to be substandard” plans, he said. 
 
 (Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA) 
 
 “I don’t blame anybody for insulating themselves against these sound bites," Clyburn said, "because that’s the world that we live in.” 
 
 Read more about: Jim Clyburn, House Democrats, Obamacare ||||| House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says House Democrats running in 2014 will embrace the Affordable Care Act in their re-election campaigns. 
 
 Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the California Democrat declined to say whether the issue would help Democrats win a House majority but said there'll be no abandoning health care as a campaign issue. 
 
 “I don’t think you can tell what will happen next year, but I will tell you this, Democrats stand tall in support of the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “We have great candidates who are running who are concerned bout our economy, are concerned about government shutdown.” 
 
 Pelosi said the economy will be the primary focus of next year’s campaign. 
 
 Of health care, she said: “This is an issue that has to be dealt with, but it doesn’t mean, ‘Oh, it’s a political issue so were going to run away from it.’ It’s too valuable for the American people. What is important about it is that the American people are well served, not who gets re-elected.” 
 
 Read more about: Nancy Pelosi, Obamacare ||||| President Barack Obama’s mishandling of the Affordable Care Act rollout has been incompetent, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said, but it doesn’t rise to past president-dooming scandals. 
 
 “What this is, it’s a mess, clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the president’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance,” Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.” 
 
 Asked by Fox host Chris Wallace if the Obamacare implementation revealed “rank incompetence,” Woodward agreed. 
 
 (Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA) 
 
 “There’s no question about that,” he said. “But you see all of these stories and this frenzy out there, the game over, the presidency is over some people are saying, and I think that’s not the case.” 
 
 But Woodward did say the ACA rollout is a harbinger of bad things to come for Obama’s White House. 
 
 (VIDEO: Sunday shows in 90 seconds) 
 
 “When you go down the road, it’s going to get worse,” he said. “It’s going to blow a hole in the budget when you go two or three months from now… All of a sudden this is going to come on the table and people are going to say, ‘My God it’s going to cost much more money than we thought before. How you disentangle this is now on Obama’s head.” 
 
 Read more about: Bob Woodward, Monica Lewinsky, Obamacare, Watergate
– Top Democrats circled the wagons today around the Affordable Care Act, with Kirsten Gillibrand offering what Politico calls "a stirring defense of the law." "The point is, if you are being offered a terrible health care plan that the minute you get sick you have to go into bankruptcy, those plans should never be offered," she said. President Obama "should have just been specific," when he said Americans could keep their plans. She dismissed 39 Democrats who voted with the GOP on a fix as "just responding to the worries of their constituents." (James Clyburn said they were "insulating themselves against soundbytes.") Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, said "Democrats stand tall in support of the Affordable Care Act. This is an issue that has to be dealt with, but it doesn’t mean, 'Oh, it’s a political issue so we're going to run away from it.’ It’s too valuable for the American people." Of the president's comments Thursday, she said, "He is gracious and he is taking responsibility." Elsewhere, on your Sunday dial: Bob Woodward on the fumbled ObamaCare rollout: "What this is, it’s a mess, clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the president’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance. So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky." LBJ daughter Luci Baines Johnson on moving into the White House: "One night I heard my mother and father actually have raised voices. That was just not in their temperament. My mother was saying, 'No, Lyndon, we can’t. We just can’t.' And my father was saying ... firmly, 'Bird, we have to… We have to move on Dec. 7 because that’s the date that’s convenient to Mrs. Kennedy and to the Secret Service.' I didn’t understand that Dec. 7 was a date that would live in infamy for their generation. Nov. 22 had become that day for me." Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone: "I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m not going to solve that problem and what I’m going to do is focus on things to make a difference. That was a really terrible time in our country’s legacy." Liz Cheney on gay marriage: "I love (openly gay sister) Mary very much, I love her family very much. This is just an issue on which we disagree. I believe in the traditional definition of marriage." The New York Times notes that Mary Cheney's wife has responded, calling Liz Cheney's comments "offensive to say the least," and warning that she's "on the wrong side of history." Scott Walker has seen the GOP's 2016 nominee, and ... "I think it's got to be an outsider, I think both the presidential and vice presidential nomination needs to be a former or current governor, people who have done successful things in their states, taken on big reforms, who are ready to move America forward." As for Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, "All good guys, but it’s got be somebody who is viewed as being exceptionally removed from Washington."