John McCain’s Character
During last week’s McCain ad blitz, he portrayed Barack Obama as a puffed-up dandy who preens like a mindless celebrity for the camera, but who offers little time for the brave men and women in uniform. It was a week of character attacks. The attacks may have nudged the polls a bit. More importantly, they defined the narrative of the week: John McCain is making this election about Barack Obama’s character.
Fair enough.
Character matters. We need to know what kind of person will occupy the White House. We need to know what goes in the heart of the person selected to be both head of government and head of state.
But what do we know about John McCain’s character?
Some people define him as a man of “honor,” defined by selfless service to country.
Others describe him as a media-hugging fraud who stabs his friends in the back, and holds no real convictions except those that give him media air time.
There is another character issue that has popped up in McCain’s life, and it has marred the political careers of politicians before. And that is his views of the women in his life. He left his first wife, Carol, after she was severely injured in a car accident during his imprisonment in a POW camp in Vietnam. He then married Cindy, a young beer distributor heiress and used her money to finance his political career.
Youthful meandering? Maybe. But in the early 1990s, when Cindy developed an addiction to pain medication, John McCain publicly called his wife a “trollop and c@nt.”
Later in the 1990s, John McCain made one of the cruelest jokes ever uttered about the First Daughter. He told a Republican dinner in 1998, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”
With that in his background, John McCain today made a truly bizarre gesture. Speaking to the massive motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, John McCain offered up his wife for the infamous beauty contest known as Miss Buffalo Chip.
Now, you may be thinking, so what? He thinks his wife is beautiful and she could win a beauty contest.
Only, everybody at Sturgis knows that Miss Buffalo Chip is NOT a standard-issue beauty contest. As ESPN explains
Buffalo Chip has a reputation for that sort of thing. It holds a Miss Buffalo Chip contest every night, which is essentially a topless beauty pageant. And occasionally bottomless, too. During a drenching rain Wednesday night, the contest broke up into smaller groups and one woman wound up dancing naked on a bar top. Her boyfriend/husband saw her and angrily dragged her away as she struggled to put her pants back on and muttered something about how, “It’s only this one week a year.”
I laughed when I heard the guys at Buffalo Chip tell the story, but then I thought about the conversation I had with Pearl Gulbranson, who was working at the Crisis Intervention Center for domestic abuse, which is located in a house across the street from the Broken Spoke. Gather 500,000 people in one spot, feed them a lot of alcohol and there are bound to be some serious problems.
“We average three or four ‘contacts’ a night,” Gulbranson said. “And a lot of women get abandoned here. They get left behind with no way of getting home. So we’re here to help.”
Here’s the video of McCain’s generous offer of his wife to the bikers:
So, if we are going to have a conversation about character, let’s consider John McCain’s view of women in his life, and women in general. He essentially offered his wife up for a Girls Gone Wild video; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more grotesque pander in my life.
Now I have no problem with McCain going to Sturgis. I have a lot of respect for biker culture, which is very strong in East Tennessee where I live. But offering your wife up for Miss Buffalo Chip – and joking that she could be the first woman to be First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip – is truly crass. When placed alongside a lifetime of callousness toward women, it reveals a troubling window into John McCain’s character.
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