Opinion: McCain going for the armchair vote?
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Sen. John McCain may have just won a significant chunk of the substantial husband vote in the Republican primaries. And lost some of the wives.
His wife, Cindy, reveals in a San Diego Magazine interview, that her husband like one or two other husbands in this country is ‘a remote-control freak. Once he gets hold of the remote control, forget it. If you want to watch something else, you’re out of luck.’
Asked which of her habits probably bothers her husband most, she said likely bringing home all kinds of stray animals. A part-time California resident (the McCains own a home in Coronado Shores adjacent to San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado), McCain says she sees her husband only two or three days a month because of all the campaigning.
She does her own share too, but returns home often to tend to family issues, including their 15-year-old daughter, Bridget, whom they adopted from Bangladesh. Another daughter just graduated from college and two sons are in the military.
What does she look for in a political candidate? ‘What I look for--and I’m a voter--is whether the candidate was true to his beliefs and honest. Telling me not what I want to hear but what the truth is.’
McCain says she has some political differences with her husband. ‘I’m certainly not lock-step with him,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have any complaints at all. I like where he stands. He’s sought my advice on some things--education, for one.’ But she adds, ‘Frankly, when he comes home, where he stands on the...
issues isn’t the first thing I want to talk about. We need to talk about the kids.’
If she was first lady, Cindy McCain says she would not attend cabinet meetings. ‘I’ve never been a political person.’ But she would continue her heavy workload with volunteer organizations. She recently returned from Vietnam, where her husband had been a POW, on an Operation Smile trip to perform cleft-palate surgery for children.
‘What I would continue to champion, in addition to my personal causes, is getting people up off the sofa, getting them involved in their neighborhoods, their communities, their states or worldwide,’ she says. ‘Shut the game down on Saturday afternoon, get off the sofa and let’s do something positive.’
Of course, this could also be a wifely trick. Getting out of the house would mean putting the remote down.
--Andrew Malcolm