Perfumed, Coiffed and Grappling With Demons: Meghan McCain's Inner Struggle

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Perfumed, Coiffed and Grappling With Demons: Meghan McCain's Inner Struggle
By ETHAN PERSOFF
Published: September 22, 2008

It has to be strange to be Meghan McCain. At 24 years old, this blonde bloggette is straddling adulthood, and noticeably hungry and plumped up for life's next chapter. Gone is the irresponsibility of youth, the fun parties and the stupid mistakes. Now is a time for positive change. Enter her father, needing help in achieving a personal goal. Say, that could work. But what if this same father is also the editorial figurehead for the continued murder of hundreds of thousands of people. What to do? Miss McCain, who previously interned at Saturday Night Live, appears to have addressed this moral conflict with the funniest joke possible: She's gone completely mad and has made a satirical child's book in tribute.

My Dad, John McCain is one of a series of three titles produced by Simon & Schuster, who also offer the humorously named Dreams Taking Flight on Hillary Clinton (whoops), and Son of Promise, Child of Hope on Barack Obama. All three titles are sycophantic and equally repulsive for their own reasons, but My Dad, John McCain is the star of the bunch: it's the only one to rise from puff piece to the level of genuinely manipulative campaign literature, as the author and political subject are directly connected by flesh and blood.

And what a fleshy piece of tribute this book is. Draped in poorly chosen blood-red endpapers and comprised of fairy tale prose that portrays John McCain as a man of the soil, we are given the odd parable of the man who struggles and survives. There is no mention of the moral consequences of his own bullheaded behavior that drives him into such circumstances. The message here is that there are no victims, ever. Other, of course, than John McCain himself.

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