The Lonesome Trail

Cindy McCain's nontraditional campaign

Earlier this year, at a town-hall meeting at the Fantasy of Flight aircraft museum, in Polk City, Florida, Cindy McCain introduced her husband, the Republican Presidential nominee, with a speech about the nature of “the man.” There are, she said, many things “that make a great man, but being a good father and a good husband are most important to me.” She wore a tight black leather blazer over a black turtleneck, and her hair was styled stiffly in a ponytail. “I was working one day, one day a long, long time ago, in Bangladesh,” McCain said. “I stumbled upon a little girl in Mother Teresa’s orphanage, and she had a really bad cleft palate and she was sick and tiny and she was only ten weeks old. And I got to know her a little bit, and I was with her for quite a while. Mother Teresa—as only she could do at that time—prevailed upon me and said, You know, you can get help for her. You could, you can get her out . . . and, being a tenacious woman, I thought, Yeah! I can. Sure.”

McCain said that on the flight home from Bangkok she “realized that this child had chosen me and I could not give her up.” But there was something even more remarkable: “What you don’t know about this story is I didn’t tell my husband.” McCain smiled mischievously as she said that, and several members of the audience tittered. “I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, with this baby in my arms, and in front of a thousand reporters and a whole lot of people he whispered down to me and said, ‘Well, where’s she going to go?’ And I said, ‘I thought she’d come to our house.’ And he looked at her and he loved her just the way I have ever since. And I think that says a great deal about the man.”

McCain’s account of bringing home a daughter without first informing her husband of her decision has become the core of the Cindy stump speech. She revisits the narrative routinely in her brief but frequent campaign appearances, and the Republican National Committee offered a version of it in a video that was played before her speech at the Convention last week. Almost every friend of the McCains with whom I spoke offered his or her own retelling of the tale. It is fact and fable: last month, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Mother Teresa was not actually at that orphanage at the time of Cindy McCain’s visit. (The McCain campaign subsequently revised the story on its Web site.) The story certainly helps to portray John McCain as openhearted and charitable. But it also happens to reflect the nearly separate lives lived by the two McCains, and the peculiar defiance that is characteristic of Cindy—a woman who claims to pride herself on being traditional.

In her size-0 St. John skirt suits, and with her lacquered coiffures, Cindy McCain appears pampered and brittle. She was taken to a hospital with a sprained wrist after a fan shook her hand with too much gusto at a campaign event in Michigan last month. Her movements are quick and sharp—birdlike—and she often seems skittish, wary-eyed, and fidgety, fussing with her nails or her BlackBerry. McCain has said that she kept her phone with her at all times so that she wouldn’t miss a call from her son Jimmy, a marine, while he was in Iraq. But he returned in mid-February, and the BlackBerry remains in his mother’s hand much of the time. She seems to be vigilant on behalf of all her children: Meghan, twenty-three, a recent Columbia graduate; John Sidney IV, twenty-two, a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy; Jimmy, twenty; and Bridget, the daughter from Bangladesh, who is now seventeen. At times, Cindy McCain seems to be channelling Nancy Reagan in her nervousness and her apparent conviction that without her protection harm will befall her family in the dangerous sphere of public life.

But McCain has unusual grit, too. She has taken up race-car driving and flying, and she has a long history of going on charity missions to Third World countries. According to her spokeswoman, Melissa Shuffield, McCain spends between two and three weeks a year travelling with Operation Smile, an organization that provides surgery for children with cleft palates, and the Halo Trust, a group that removes land mines from countries still riddled with unexploded ordnance. Like her husband, however, she does not support an international ban on land mines. “As much as I know her, I don’t get in any big political discussions with Cindy or intellectual discussions about poverty,” Dr. Bill Magee, the co-founder of Operation Smile, said. “It’s more like, What can we do for these kids today? People have a great time. It brings together the risk-taker with the compassionate. If you take a look at Cindy, she does crazy things in terms of most people’s idea of normal.” Magee went on to talk about McCain’s race-car driving, and offered his version of her decision to adopt Bridget: “She’s on the tarmac, she’s got this impoverished black kid with a hole in the roof of her mouth, and John says, ‘Fine!’ It’s crazy.”

When I travelled with the campaign in late spring, I asked the McCains, who were seated on the curved banquette at the back of the Straight Talk Express, how they imagined Cindy’s role as First Lady might affect her humanitarian work.

“I think some of her travels might be curtailed,” Senator McCain, who was wearing a blue Navy baseball cap, replied. “She’s been to Cambodia, where land mines are very dangerous, and no one knows exactly where they are, so that may be a little bit of a downside of her involvement.”
Staring into the middle distance, as she often does, Cindy McCain proceeded to contradict her husband. “What I tell everyone is, regardless of whether we win or lose, I will continue to do what I do because it’s so important to be an example,” she said firmly. “To my own children, and also for other kids in the community. Regardless of whether we win or lose.”

“Stop saying that,” John McCain interrupted.

“Say ‘when we win,’ ” Janet Huckabee instructed. She and her husband, the former Arkansas governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, were travelling with the campaign that day.

Cindy McCain gave a flicker of a smirk. “When we win,” she said. And she didn’t say anything more...