Dirty Sexy Politics
By Meghan McCain
(Hyperion, 194 pages, $23.99)
One hesitation that any male reviewer will have when attempting
to evaluate Dirty Sexy Politics is this: do I really want
to make Meghan McCain cry?
It’s not a hard thing to do because Miss McCain is admittedly
“way too sensitive for politics probably, and really emotional by
nature.” Moreover, she is proud of this fact. “I can’t fight it and
I don’t want to,” she writes in this brief memoir of life on the
campaign trail. “I’d rather have big feelings than shut down and
become dead inside. I’ve seen what that way of dealing with life
does to people, how it plays a direct hand in the disconnection
between politics and people.”
Color her connected. While the rest of John McCain’s offspring
decided to take a pass on their dad’s ill-fated second bid for the
presidency, Meghan, a recent graduate from Columbia with a degree
in art history, decided what she really wanted to do was ride the
Straight Talk Express. Using funds inherited from her maternal
grandfather, Meghan hired a team to help her produce McCain
Blogette, a daily online campaign diary with lots and lots of
pictures.
The media buzz generated by that effort helped her to secure two
book contracts — for the children’s book My Dad, John
McCain and this present effort — and an irregular column for
the Daily Beast. Titles of the four most recent columns
will give readers a sense of her literary achievements there: “The
Palin Girls Don’t Share”; “The Right Guy Won in Arizona”; “Meghan
Meets Michaele Salahi”; and, daringly, “I Don’t Care About Obama’s
iPod.”
Meghan takes pride in taking politics very personally, so we
aren’t surprised to learn that she has strong opinions about the
person her dad should have picked as his running mate to lose to
Barack Obama. She wanted Joe Lieberman and hoped that it wouldn’t
be Mike Huckabee (who should go “lead the evangelicals”) or —
shudder — Mitt Romney.
Miss McCain worried about “campaigning across the country with
five married Mormon men” — Romney’s five sons — “and all those
baby grandchildren…” The Romneys were “all so handsome, in a
tooth-whitener commercial kind of way, and so seriously wholesome”
that they might object to the “constant drinking and swearing that
went on in our campaign…[n]ot to mention all the tawdry stories
about crazy-sex…” that she insists, loudly, she didn’t participate
in.
She graciously allows that she could have accepted the Romneys
but she worried that “they’d disapprove of me — my bleached hair,
my swearing, my ‘edgy’ clothes, not to mention my gay friends.
Would they accept me or scorn me as some kind of closet liberal who
didn’t fit in?”
Fortunately, she didn’t have to risk their wholesome Mormon
disapproval. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign worried that she’d
blab it, and so refused to tell her that they’d decided on Alaska
governor Sarah Palin for veep. That was just too much. After mother
Cindy McCain told her, “I’m not going to tell you” because “we
don’t want anyone to know,” Meghan “clicked off the phone and
immediately started crying,” and that wasn’t all. “Crying became
bawling, which evolved quickly into uncontrollable sobbing.”
It fell to Shannon and Heather, her blog production team, to get
her ready for the cameras:
“You need to bathe!” Shannon admonished.
I kept sobbing.
“You’ve got to pull it together!”
I was still overcome.
“People are going to be watching you, girl.”
It was hard to fathom why my parents would let me down so
much.
“Get showered, get serious, and get some mascara on!”
Eventually, she showered. On the bus to meet Palin, Meghan
decided she had chosen the wrong outfit. She headed to the bathroom
to change dresses and a, uh, wardrobe malfunction ensued: “When a
zipper became stuck on my bra, I kicked open the bathroom door,
stood in the back of the bus in my bra, and called out to my
friends.” In case you were worried, she was fully clothed and no
longer teary-eyed by the time she met the Palins.
Meghan cries a lot in this brief book: before meeting the
Palins; at the Republican convention; after she reads a profile of
her in Esquire, which painted her as a beer-swilling,
bi-curious, bleached-blond firecracker; countless times along the
campaign trail; and any time she thinks of New Hampshire.
John McCain’s handlers found her so difficult to manage that
they eventually offered her a choice: either go home or take your
own bus well away from the main McCain campaign, on a tour through
“Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, and Florida.” She took the bus. Her
dad lost all four states.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO TAKE Miss McCain’s political ideas seriously,
but let’s pretend. She wanted Lieberman for vice president, the
same Joe Lieberman who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. He is
technically an independent after he lost a Democratic primary, but
has the voting record of a typical moderate liberal Democrat. This
would have led to an open revolt by delegates to the Republican
National Convention. They would have rejected her dad’s pick and
who knows where they would have stopped.
Meghan calls herself “passionately pro-life” (Mormon
grandchildren notwithstanding) but it seems more rhetoric than a
real, thought-out, grown-up position. She finds advocacy of
abstinence to be practically medieval. She frets that in dealing
with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, the McCain campaign should have
used this as “an opportunity to discuss the importance of
contraception.” Boy, wouldn’t that have made a great line in John
McCain’s stump speeches!
And she cannot fathom why the Republican Party doesn’t get with
it on gay marriage and being more tolerant of…her outfits. A gay
friend of mine satirized her point of view by writing, “She, like,
has tattoos and stuff. And is, like, totally not one of those
H8rs!”
Our young author could have given us ample reasons to want to
read an account of the McCain campaign. She doesn’t have a supple
intellect but she does have other charms. Her children’s book
making the case for her father wasn’t awful and McCain Blogette had
a lot of fun campaign pics she could have used to wrap a narrative
around.
But those pictures are nowhere to be found in Dirty Sexy
Politics and have been removed from the website. She’s making
a play for readers to take her seriously — an effort that can only
end in tears, I’m afraid.
