Being Mrs. McCain

Posted on Feb 4, 2008

AP photo / Charles Dharapak

McCains in flight: Cindy and John in a chartered airplane on Sunday.

The UK’s Times Online certainly chose a very particular frame for its profile of John McCain’s wife, Cindy, as evidenced by the headline: “Flawed Cindy McCain Has a Grudge List.” Further down, Mrs. McCain gets a bit more credit when writer Tony Allen-Mills predicts she’d make a “formidable but flawed first lady.” There appears to be a pattern at work here.

Times Online:

McCain’s marriage has long attracted attention both for the 18-year age gap between husband and wife and for their adopted Asian daughter, who became the focus of one of the most vicious dirty tricks of the 2000 presidential campaign.

The couple have also overcome daunting health problems that included McCain’s bouts with skin cancer, a stroke suffered by Cindy in 2004, and her admission a decade earlier that she had become so addicted to painkillers that she was stealing them from a medical charity she ran.

Yet somehow the McCains have emerged as a potent and durable political partnership. Cindy McCain was at her husband’s side last week as he celebrated the Florida primary victory that has put him at the front of the Republican field.

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