This is Meghan McCain's account of what it was to follow her father John on the campaign trail in 2008. The majority of it takes place between the time that Sarah Palin is picked as his running mate and a few days after the election. It's not very dirty. It's also not very sexy.
THE GOOD: I like Meghan McCain, and, up until Karl Rove stole her father's brain in 2008, I liked him. I realize that, as a liberal, I'm not supposed to admit to liking conservatives, but I do. (For the record, I also like Ben Stein and P J O'Rourke.) I like to watch her interviews. I think that she's intelligent, forthright and cute as a bug. Not to mention a little sexy.
She also takes the republican party to task for its changes. Here are a couple of quotes from late in the book, when she addresses the changes in the party of both she and her father.
“The bedrock of the republican party is freedom of the individual. Not groupthink. Not hatred. Not moral codes that we are supposed to live up to.”
She talks about the republican party's belief that each individual should be able to decide for themselves. Not, as she puts it, “... not their party, not their government, not a religious movement or an angry radio host.”
On the last page of the book, she says “... when a political party starts to put itself in a box, it's not a box... it's a coffin.”
THE BAD: I like Meghan McCain, but she doesn't use the tools of the writer's trade very well. Her sentence structure is sometimes odd, and her turns of phrase are sometimes off.
Her biggest struggle seems to be with commas. God knows I have my own issues with commas, but can usually overcome them with a careful edit. Meghan seems to have aimed a fully-loaded comma gun at her book and pulled the trigger. So you wind up with sentences like “Just seeing him, like that, made me cry”, or “He is a grill master, and loves feeding people”.
I would recommend to Meghan that she either take a little more care with her tools if she rights another book, or pay a professional editor to do it for her. I enjoyed her book, but found it a little frustrating to read for this reason.
THE UGLY: I like Meghan McCain, but she seems to (perhaps understandably) be incapable of viewing her father as a man, rather than an icon. She points out how narrow the republican party has become without acknowledging the narrow stances that her father took in 2008 in order to gain their support. She talks about how badly Sarah Palin disrupted things, but refuses to give her father any blame for Palin's presence or for allowing her to take center stage from the time she joined the race onward.
I like you, Meghan. But your dad fucked things up in 2008. As Arianna Huffington put it during the presidential race, “We all have to come to the realization that the John McCain that we all loved in 2000 is dead.” Your dad SHOULD have been the republican nominee in 2000. Were he, I would have voted for him, he would have become president and, I think, the world would be a better place. Especially our little corner of it, America. If he had stuck by his moderate roots in 2008, been the same candidate that he was in 2000, instead of taking that weird, disturbing lurch to the right, had picked a moderate running mate, I think that he would have given Barack Obama a run for his money.
Sadly, he didn't.
Overall, I recommend the book. It's an easy, short read (less than 200 pages) and a lot of fun. Hopefully, republicans will read this book and return to its traditional values of individual freedom and limited government before it lets the narrowness of the religious right and tea party movement tear it apart.
Peace.
Rev. Randal
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