Cindy McCain & Recipe-Gate Part 2: A Teapot in a Tempest

But of course:  it’s always the mid-Twentieth Century for a certain segment of the American public. Family Circle is sponsoring a bake-off between potential First Spouses.  Which one is the best role model for the homemakers of America?  As The New York Daily News says, ‘[T]he stakes are not small. The wives of the winners of the last four presidential elections have also won this competition.’   

So…by failing to win this competition, Michelle or Cindy may cause their husbands to lose the election.  Furthermore, they’ll reveal themselves to be unfit to be a presidential spouse.  A presidential spouse needs to be a good role model for a helpmeet, even if the spouse is Bill Clinton.  Bill submitted a recipe for oatmeal cookies. I suppose there is some statistic somewhere proving that people who bake are more supportive and more likely to understand the pressures of being president.

Bill Clinton’s oatmeal cookies originated with the Clinton family chef. (Family Circle)  Michelle Obama attributes hers to a family friend; Cindy McCain to a ‘good friend.’   (Family Circle) Those who care are meant to bake them all and vote at Family Circle.  You can see their cookie recipes at the website.

Cindy McCain’s in trouble because her recipe for oatmeal butterscotch cookies turns out to be the same as Hershey’s.  Oops.  I can guess how it happened.  Probably the good friend’s mom used to make delicious Hershey’s butterscotch cookies without attribution. After all, the average cookie-baking mom wouldn’t say, ‘I’ve made a plate of  butterscotch cookies using the Hershey’s recipe.’  She just says, ‘Here is a butterscotch cookie.  Go play outside.’   Possibly she learned to bake cookies from watching her mom and never realized that it was a Hershey’s restaurant. 

I myself was very surprised the last time I baked anything — I think it was 1981 — when I asked my best friend for her recipe for tollhouse cookies and she said, ‘Just look on the back of the bag for the Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate chips.’ 

What if Cindy McCain had said, ‘Here’s my favorite recipe.  It’s from Hershey’s.’  Would that have been a problem?  Surely Hershey’s would have appreciated the plug.

Sadly for Cindy, she’s been accused before of purloining other people’s recipes .  In April, the New York Daily News reminds us,  the McCain campaign blamed an intern for putting up a recipe at the McCain campaign website that was attributed to Cindy. Actually, it was a recipe from the Food Network.  David Weiner at The Huffington Post was rather mordant about Cindy and Recipe-gate Part 1.  Now that we’re onto Part 2 I am afraid that her reputation for stealing recipes is confirmed.

It all seems pretty silly to me.  I can list a dozen reasons for not voting for McCain right off the top of my head and a dozen more with a little further thought and not one of them is ‘Because Cindy didn’t win the bake-off (or rather "bake-off")’ or even ‘Because Cindy steals recipes.’   

It’s a bit pathetic to me that someone in the campaign thought that she needed to share ‘her’ recipes at the website in the first place, but of course McCain’s ‘base’ are Republicans.  In my rather extensive experience of Republicans, quite a few of those over forty (and maybe some of the younger ones; who knows) have strong convictions about what ‘womenfolk’ are for.  One of the things is cooking.  This is one of many reasons I am a Democrat. If the campaigns feel that the presidential spouses must participate in this sort of event, at least Bill Clinton was on hand to prove that real Democrats don’t care which spouse borrows the recipe.

Michelle Cottle writes at The New Republic, and she is 100% correct:

So what does this tell us about the state of the union–or at least of the presidential race? It tells us that it’s time to stop treating the candidates’ spouses as embarrassing stereotypes by making them jump through absurd hoops that, let’s face it, even many hard-care, full-time stay-at-home mommies would be hard pressed to handle. I mean, who has time these days to bake homemade cookies–not just from scratch–but from some carefully crafted recipe that these spouses either dreamed up themselves or inherited from their
Great Aunt Beullah?

Sadly — again — for Cindy, all the Republican homemakers I know are way more likely than the Democrats to get miffed if you steal their recipes. They don’t even care if you provide appropriate attribution. They’re very protective of their intellectual property rights. These allegations, however absurd, at the Junior League and the country club.

Will Cookie-gate lose McCain the general? Only time will tell.

But hang on. Michelle Cottle is giving me an idea. Idea for a reality show: Michelle and Cindy compete in twelve tasks designed to see whether they have what it takes to be role models. Gordon Ramsay, Tim Gunn, and Martha Stewart are the judges, assisted each week by a revolving panel of experts. Remember, you heard it first from me.

CROSS-POSTED AT BUCK NAKED POLITICS