I can never decide whether I find Cindy McCain appalling or pathetic. On the rare occasions when she's opened her mouth during this campaign, it's been to say something nasty about her opponents. On the other hand, when I see her up there with her husband and Sarahcuda, with that little rictus of a stiff smile, I wonder what she thinks of her husband traveling around the country with this year's conservative pinup girl, especially given his past as a womanizer with a wandering eye.
I also wonder what's happened to her sense of style. I remember back in 2000, when her face was mobile, she used to dress in those smart tailored suits so favored by Republican women. Her hair was short, frosted, and pixieish, and her face was animated. Now she wears her hair unflatteringly long, it looks dried out, and the little puffy sleeved dresses she seems to favor these days all too often don't flatter a woman in her fifties, even an attractive one with good facial bone structure.
Cindy McCain always seems unhappy to me; a woman playing a role she really doesn't like. On the whole, though, she seems far less sanctimonious than most Republican political wives and aside from the quarter of a million dollars in bling she wore to the Republican National Convention, doesn't seem to flaunt her wealth.
Yes, she had her little problem with painkillers and her charity, but I don't see her running all over the country demanding stiffer sentences for drug users either. And when all's said and done, she may be married to one of the most venal political hacks in the country, but she is a woman who at least tries through philanthropy to do some good in the world.
I'd much rather see Michelle Obama greeting the dignitaries at state dinners, but Cindy McCain usually makes me feel more pity than outrage.
It is in that context that I say that I really don't understand, other than the fact that this is typical Jodi Kantor territory, why this article in today's New York Times was even necessary. It doesn't shed any light on Cindy McCain that we haven't already seen, and it feels like as much of a hatchet job as Kantor pieces on Chelsea Clinton, Barack Obama's religious journey, and Michelle Obama have been. Kantor's articles tend to tread on territory many times already trod, and add nothing new to the political dialogue.
Glenn Greenwald raises the point that there no longer seem to be any journalistic standards about what in a public figure's private life is off-limits anymore. Perhaps in a world of TMZ and OK! and Perez Hilton, there aren't any limits anymore. But Greenwald is right that this article about Cindy McCain, with its innuendo about the state of the McCains' marriage that echoes Patrick Healy's earlier Times piece on the Clintons' marriage, uses the same loose standards that have resulted in a kind of journalistic One Percent Doctrine, in which if there is a one percent chance that a story, or a rumor, or gossip, might be true, journalists proceed as if it were 100 percent true, and what's more, as if it were relevant. This is how the e-mails about Barack Obama being a secret Muslim, or not born in the U.S., or a terrorist sympathizer, came to be accepted as fact -- because if Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson reports them, even as rumors, they are given credibility.
Sarah Palin's personal life is fair game because she has set herself, and her family, up as paragons of the Real American Christian Family Ideal. Sara Robinson, who probably wishes her name was anything else these days, wrote about the pattern of family problems in the Palin family, from the son who went into the military to avoid a coke dealing rap, to the pregnant teenaged daughter, to a younger daughter who isn't always the cutie-pie we've been shown on television, to a special needs baby whose mother and father never even look at him in public, instead shunting him off to the pregnant teen as a kind of scarlet letter. Sarah Palin jetting around the country running for office when her children are so clearly screaming for help and attention IS valid for questioning. Cindy McCain's problems of a decade ago aren't, particularly when for all that I dislike the McCains, their kids seem to have turned out relatively OK, son Andrew's failed bank notwithstanding.
There are enough real reasons to oppose the election of John McCain. The points brought up by this article aren't among them.
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