-
sponsorship
The media adventures of Meghan McCain have become a bit of a hobbyhorse for me, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when four e-mails showed up in my inbox with a link to this Daily Beast article she wrote about the difficulties of dating in the wake of her father's failed presidential campaign. McCain's first article for the Tina Brown startup, a semi-reported piece on how poorly the GOP has adopted to technology, was a strong start and a subject upon which she has a certain purchase. Her second effort, an "exclusive" sit-down interview with, um, her mommy, had the whiff of seventh-grade civics project writ embarrassingly large, but I guess journalists might as well use the access they get, right? (Maybe she just interpreted the old chestnut "If your mother tells you she loves, you, check it out" as a story assignment.) But now she's turned to writing this "Looking for Mr. Far Right" column, wherein she moans that "One extreme fan of my mother's recently told me I could be ‘his Cindy.' And then asked me if I ever wore pearls because they probably would look as good on me as they do on my mother. No, I'm not kidding. Any guy that has a fetish for older women in pantsuits and large pearls obviously only finds my last name attractive about me."
Oh, Meghan. I feel for her, I really do. That's weird and terribly awkward, as I imagine much of her life must be. But still, writing about how your political dad kills your love life probably isn't the best way to distance yourself from that particular issue or establish an independent identity. It sure is a great way to get page views and stay in the spotlight, though.
-
sponsorship
It's fairly remarkable that Cindy McCain does not see the irony in complaining about the New York Times' biased reporting during an interview given by her own daughter. The Daily Beast posted this interview of Cindy by Meghan McCain, in which the former tries once again to present herself as a salt-of-the-earth Jane Winebox. She claims not to care about clothes beyond being "comfortable and easy to pack" and shares her gross hotel experiences, like "that one in Iowa that had the bathtub in the middle of the room was pretty bad." This multimillionaires-are-just-like-us posturing is all well and good, but I don't understand why Cindy feels she still needs to do this. From the excellent Ariel Levy New Yorker profile of McCain that came out in September, it seemed that Cindy did not at all relish her time in the public eye, and this sort of thing will only prolong her exposure. Maybe she's just doing it to promote her new nonprofit organizations, but the timing of the article is odd if that was Cindy's intent. Why did she choose this inaugural moment to exonerate herself?
-
sponsorship
I'll see you and raise you, Julia; I don't give a rip how much Cindy's outfit cost. Of all the phony-spumoni windows into character, the gotcha of pointing out that presidential candidates and their spouses have done well in life, and thus have nice stuff, really does nothing for me. (It's not eating arugula that makes you an elitist, or wearing diamonds that makes you Marie Antoinette, either; Cindy travels around the world doing relief work, so case closed on that front.) I just did a piece on Michelle Obama for Reader's Digest, too, and I saw where one reader had posted a complaint that if I weren't such a crazy Michelle lover, I would have pointed out the damning fact that she wears $500 Jimmy Choos! And not only that, but she sees a personal trainer! OK, duly noted, but are we really voting on shoes now? In the race for worst-shod, I guess Ralph Nader would win. :(
-
sponsorship
Speaking of feeling sorry for Cindy McCain, I felt a spasm of pity for the woman during the GOP Convention, when Vanity Fair’s “Politics & Power” blog published a post called “Cindy McCain’s $300,000 Outfit” claiming that one of her looks—the mustard-colored one, with the evil-countess collar—cost 300 grand. The sensational figure quickly got picked up by the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the Los Angeles Times, even U.S. News and World Report; one HuffPo commenter railed: “THIS LADY IS PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE 'LET THEM EAT CAKE' AND 'LATTE DA' MENTALITY OF BOTH THE BUSHIES AND MAC AND WIFE.”
But the claim—republished everywhere—was just a guess! Vanity Fair’s “fashion department” estimated prices for most of Cindy’s clothes and accessories, and said her earrings, if real, were three-carat diamonds worth $280,000. The sum is plausible for a pair of earrings that size (I called Harry Winston, which had a particularly high-quality pair on sale for a cool half-million), but every diamond expert I consulted, from Norman Landsberg in New York’s diamond district to Jim Shigley at the Gemological Institute of America, said it is impossible to estimate the size of a diamond—and even to tell whether it is synthetic or natural—from a photograph. “How would anybody actually know unless they had the earrings in their hand to examine them?” Landsberg said. “It would just be an incorrect guess.” One point of difficulty: Diamonds come in different shapes and can be broad but shallow, or relatively narrow but deeper, so it’s tough to accurately estimate carat size even if you can make a good guess about the diameter of a gem in its setting. The editor of Vanity Fair’s site, Michael Hogan, said the figures came from “a source who is a major player in the diamond industry” who “provided the estimates for the number of carats and the price.” But unless the source is the guy who sold Cindy the studs, the guess has a pretty big margin of error.
So: Cindy may well have been wearing jewelry that cost more than a house. (When Slate e-mailed the campaign to ask, it never responded.) But perhaps, conscious that her husband had recently taken flak for wearing $500 loafers, she opted for fakes. Or perhaps the earrings were a gift. Or an heirloom. Or something she bought years ago, for much less. The point is, we don’t know. Vanity Fair was candid that it was just publishing estimates, but that didn't stop the figure from ricocheting around the Web. The whole flap struck me as a new low in price-tag journalism—the already basement-level practice of reporting on the cost of political figures’ haircuts, glasses, and clothes. I understand our obsession with what politicians spend, but we shouldn’t bash Cindy for extravagance when we don’t really know the details.
-
sponsorship
When I sat down with Cindy McCain for Reader's Digest, the most dramatic thing was how changed she was from 2000, not only physically, though that's also true, but in her demeanor. I remembered her from her husband's first run as being a lot of fun—not in the "Guy walks into a bar ...'' sense, but she'd always seemed genuinely amused, which is about all you can be as the circus is passing by. In those days, she sometimes said true things, too—not anything wildly out-of-school, but that she'd never before spent so much time with her husband, and that any day John trotted out a new joke was a happy, happy day. Also, I must say that I admired her as a wife, for being so supportive and all-in. When my husband wrote a book that came out that year, I remember promising him that at Politics & Prose, I was going to be on my very best Cindy McCain behavior for at least five minutes, and look at him like he was the last piece of cake; I wasn't completely kidding, either.
Now, though, she seems like an altogether different person, someone I hadn't met before. As I say in the piece, she's been through a lot since 2000, so maybe that's it. But she does seem far more brittle, like she's been warned that if she says anything remotely in keeping with human experience, someone will come and do harm to her loved ones. Part of her is really strong, or she would not go on these humanitarian trips all over creation; I think that's probably the truest part of her, and where she can really be herself. Another part of her, however, seems just plain petrified, and maybe that's not an irrational reaction, either.
Anyway, Dahlia, to answer what you asked me, I am not usually an asker of very tough questions—go with your strength, I say, and I'm more Larry King than Tim Russert. (I was going to say I was more Baba Wawa, but she and the rest of the "View' crew were tougher on John McCain than anyone else has been this cycle.) Yet I finally did get so frustrated with Cindy's beyond-boilerplate answers—she's never seen her husband lose his temper, they've never had an argument, he constantly amazes her because he's "so young''—that I did, to my own surprise and believe me to hers, blurt out a question about whether the stories that he'd called her an ugly name were true, I guess just to see if it mattered what I asked. Her response: "Oh, no! Oh no, no, no! Oh please; you know something? No. But I—no, absolutely not; preposterous!''
She did go out on a limb and suggest that abortion wouldn't be a big issue for voters this year: "You know something? We have a war, an economy that's failing right now, we have people without homes and jobs, we have an immigration issue and those are the issues of the day.'' But she declined to say whether she agreed with her husband's view that Viagra should be covered by insurance, while birth control pills should not: "You'd have to ask him with regard to what you're talking about.''
And, here is what maybe should have been my lede: She has the shiniest legs I've ever seen.
-
sponsorship
Hey Melinda! Reading your great Readers Digest interview with Cindy McCain today all I could think was: Can she possibly be as frail as she sounds? With the exception of the great tale of her rolling up her sleeves to singlehandedly balance the campaign’s books, it all comes across like she’s made of crystal, and reflects quite a contrast with Sarah Palin. Was it hard to ask her tough questions?
-
sponsorship
So I take my eye off Planet Palin for a half a minute—and by the time I get back, Dahlia has sworn off the stuff altogether, and the rest of you are acting like what Barack Obama said about lipstick is no big oink; are you kidding? I am so outraged, I am ONLY going to communicate in down-home phrases re: pigs from now on, in a kind of sarcastic solidarity with my fellow feminist John McCain. That'll show him how the hog eats the cabbage!
Seriously, I take all my cues on sisterhood from John, because who respects women more? That's why Obama'd have hardly anything to work with if he wanted to make an ad in response. Well, except for the footage of McCain laughing and then saying, "Excellent question'' when asked, "How do we beat the bitch?'' OK, and maybe that clip of the minister asking McCain if he really called his wife the c-word. I'm not sure Obama should rely on the 1986 story in the Tucson Citizen quoting McCain telling a joke about rape—even if it was a lot like the one that drove his buddy Claytie Williams out of politics. I guess if Obama really wanted to get down in the mud, he could reference the stripper McCain dated, or the gentlemanly way he behaved with his first—oh, who are we kidding?—with both of his wives. If Hillary's gotten over that—what's the word I want?—deferential joke he made about Chelsea, then who are we to go there? And it would be a total cheap shot to use the footage of him telling biker dudes of America that the mother of four of his children would make a great Miss Buffalo Chip. But John McCain, friend of the female? My friends, that would be a change.
-
sponsorship
OK, here's a question: Years before the sex-scandal press conference or the chunky pearls, do political wives see their husbands differently than the rest of us see the mere mortals we promised to love, honor and so on? Obviously, there's no one model for a marriage in the public eye, any more than there is for a marriage only the neighbors care about—and even then, not that much as long as you keep the noise down. But I do wonder whether some of these spouses don't end up extra disillusioned because they're required to put their mates on the kind of pedestal that Mr. Ellen Tien has never set foot on. (No, that most certainly does not mean that whatever happens is on them, especially since idealizing these politicians is such a big part of their job description.) And yes, I am thinking all this because of the current John Edwards scandal, and because to say that Elizabeth believes in John is like saying that Washington is on the warm side this time of year, or Middlemarch is not a bad book.
But most mates of the contenders seem to feel that way—or maybe it only looks like that because when they don't appear to believe their men were born in a manger, we totally freak out, like how dare Teresa Heinz mention her deceased husband, the father of her children, and how unheard of for Michelle Obama to remark upon even the most minute and mundane of her husband's flaws. I keep thinking about Cindy McCain, when her husband was running the first time, telling me that she found her husband "a real inspiration'' -- and then stopping herself, quite charmingly, and adding, "I guess anyone would say that about their husband.'' No, they wouldn't; in fact, outside the bubble, I've never heard any woman say, suggest, hint, or infer any such thing, no matter how nice her husband or contented her marriage. So, without letting any of these guys off the hook, I guess my question is, isn't the public's demand for a mythic narrative that no actual person can ever live up to part of the problem?
-
sponsorship
And so begins the bride-off. Blech.
Articles like this one pitting Michelle Obama against Cindy McCain, remind me of how gross the position of first lady can really be. The wives of the candidates are being evaluated for such important qualities as jeans-size, glamour, personal wealth, public speaking abilities, and sense of style. Obama is in trouble for over-sharing (Barack is sock-challenged.) McCain for under-sharing (her financial info). Oh and now Michelle is being called “Obama's baby mama" by the ever-classy Fox News (although for my money that fist-bump pretty much redefined foreplay in America for a generation or two).
Maybe it’s too much to hope for anything less than the relentless meringue of these kinds of pieces, but given that we were but a breath away from a Cindy McCain versus Bill Clinton race, is it possibly time to rethink the way we talk about presidential spouses in a way that bypasses the size of their jeans?
-
sponsorship
1) As usual, a woman's skinny blondness is admitted as evidence against her, once again deflecting suspicion from zaftig brunettes.
2) As noted by Emily Y., insinuations about said skinny blonde are better than a spa week for making an old soldier young again.
3) Thank you, New York Times, for reminding us that unless the mistress (or mister) steps to the microphone, the teller of the tale is the one who comes off looking like the villain.
4) There's something touching about a man whose young friend so closely resembles the missus; is this the ultimate backhanded compliment? (And is that why Cindy McCain looked so oddly but genuinely pleased standing beside her man yesterday as he denied doing anything wrong ever?)
5) Is that an earmark in your pocket...? The possible sex scandal also diverts attention from the fact that Iseman's firm specializes in getting earmarks for clients—and didn't I hear that McCain was against those?
-
sponsorship
When I heard what Michelle Obama said, I thought uh-oh, classic DiKinsleyan gaffe: She said something true but unflattering, and thus a total no-no for someone in her position; that's why they call it impolitic. I also assumed she was talking about race, though that might be a total projection, because when I say I've never been prouder of my country, what I mean is that though the sickness of racism has afflicted us from the beginning, we may finally be ready to prove ourselves better than that.
The more scandalous quote, if we took it at all seriously, would be the one from Cindy McCain, about how she has always been and always will be proud of her country. I'm sure she did not mean that Abu Ghraib or water-boarding or cherry-picking intel to justify the wrong war have filled her with pride; and honestly, under her husband, I don't think any of those occasions for shame would have occurred. But, apparently, you can never go wrong saying things that everyone knows not to take too literally. Which may be why Hillary carries on giving victory speeches.
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, you got that right: Putting prospective first ladies in red suits is a none-too-subtle code meant to evoke the administration that's currently back in nostalgic vogue. Nancy Reagan wore the color so often (usually in that same fire-engine shade we saw last night) that it came to be called "Reagan red." Last year, Mrs. Reagan took Laura Bush on a tour of an exhibit of red dresses at the Reagan Library. To wear it is to quote her as unambiguously as McCain evoked the Reagan/Stallone '80s by marching onstage to the Rocky theme for his victory speech. Michelle Obama's donning of the hue is more complex. Obviously, this choice is supposed to recall the general optimism of the morning-in-America days. But is it also meant to reassure us that Michelle, who only last year left her high-powered job as an executive at the University of Chicago hospitals, will remain safely on the Nancy-esque sidelines when her husband becomes president, confining her role to charity work like the cleft-palate foundation whose board Cindy McCain serves on (and through which she adopted their now-16-year-old daughter from Bangladesh)? At any rate, the color-coded association of both women with the ultimate loyal-but-silent political spouse clearly serves to distance them from a certain prospective first husband who doesn't need to wear loud colors to get himself noticed.