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Friday 5 December 2008

Like father, like daughter

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John McCain’s age is, sadly, going to be an issue in this campaign. If he wins in November, he would be the oldest president ever elected to a first term and a recent poll suggested that as many as 40 percent of voters worry about McCain’s age.  One of McCain’s main assets in trying to defusing the age issue will be his three twenty-something children. One of his sons—who is actually 19 but will be 20 this summer—has just returned from Iraq and his other is at the Naval Academy but it is his daughter, Meghan, who has taken the most public role in the campaign. She travels with her dad and keeps a popular campaign blog.

The latest step in Meghan’s raised profile is an interview in GQ. Taken in isolation half the quotes in the interview would give a press person heart-burn but the overall level of candour make the points she really wants to make about her father and the campaign more credible—it is a tactic for dealing with the press that she has clearly picked up from her father who adopts exactly the same approach.

What the McCains are relying on is that quotes about the stripper Dita Von Teese, “I love the way she dresses. If I could look like that all day, I would…in her day clothes, I mean.“And, yes, I know she’s a fetish star, but”—she lowers her head for this—“I think that’s rock ’n’ roll.” Or, the qualities of merchant bankers, “Not everybody wants to go out with somebody so high-profile. If they do, they’re investment bankers. Seriously. Ugh! If you’re an investment banker, don’t hit on me. You can quote me. I’m not interested.” Or, Barack Obama’s good looks, “universally women find him [Barack Obama] attractive” will cause less trouble to the campaign than the benefit she will provide by helping to dispell the idea that her father is too old to be president.  

My guess is that the gamble will play off both because the press tends to go easy on the children of candidates and as, like her dad, it is hard not to warm to Meghan. Just take this exchange with the young Washington-journalist sent out to Arizona to interview her: 

“I like bad boys for the most part,” Meghan adds. “In the past, I have liked tattooed guys who wear Converse. But I’d be open to anyone as long as you have a sense of humor. I have also dated totally normal guys who look like you, I guess—D.C.-looking guys.”

D.C.-looking guys?

“Journalist, yuppie, metrosexual guys. How’s that? You’re metro.” 

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