I’ve enjoyed Meghan McCain’s blog, McCainBlogette, since I first became aware of it long before we started this blog. Its not your common political blog. Meghan McCain and a few of her cohorts write about life on the campaign trail from their point of view. She gives a lot of insight into what goes on behind the scenes. She shares a lot of pictures and you can tell she adores her daddy. She looks a lot like him too, I think … but that’s beside the point.

I think she has been a real asset to John McCain’s campaign in her own way. She’s down to earth, genuine, open and a very likable young lady. I’ll resist the temptation to go into the obvious differences in personality, availability, likability, openness, etc between her and any other political daughters in the same age group or a few years older that come to mind.

She recently set down with Greg Veis of GQ and gave an interview. Here are some excerpts:

Meghan McCain arrives at the door to her apartment out of breath and wobbly in calf-high boots. It’s a seventy-five-degree February afternoon in Phoenix, and the 23-year-old daughter of the presumptive Republican nominee for president is wearing a black leather jacket over a scarf and gray scoop-neck T-shirt. I extend my hand to introduce myself, but she knocks it down and wraps me up in a bear hug.

“I’ve never had anybody fly across the country for me who I wasn’t dating,” she says. “I’m so flattered!”

Meghan deftly maneuvers Veis away from her bedroom and into a restaurant (good girl!)

Alas, the tour stops here. Meghan won’t show me her bedroom—it’s too messy, she says. Besides, she’s starving, and she really wants to take me to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants ever, Garduño’s Margarita Factory.

The kind of guys she likes

“I like bad boys for the most part,” Meghan adds. “In the past, I have liked tattooed guys who wear Converse. But I’d be open to anyone as long as you have a sense of humor. I have also dated totally normal guys who look like you, I guess—D.C.-looking guys.”

D.C.-looking guys?

“Journalist, yuppie, metrosexual guys. How’s that? You’re metro.”

“I’m an acquired taste,” Meghan says matter-of-factly. “I’m a daughter of a Republican senator. I started dating this guy, and he wouldn’t date me anymore because he found out who my dad was. He says, ‘I don’t agree with his politics.’ Isn’t that terrible? That’s why you’re dumping me? We only went on two dates, but still. Not everybody wants to go out with somebody so high-profile. If they do, they’re investment bankers. Seriously. Ugh! If you’re an investment banker, don’t hit on me. You can quote me. I’m not interested.”

She’s pretty feisty, kinda like her father

Meghan puts it more succinctly: “I’m almost incapable of bullshit. He’s the same way.”

What she thinks of Barack Obama

“He’s a rock star,” she says of the Illinois senator. “Everybody flipped out, but I think universally women find him attractive. Whatever.”

On the rumor she dated a Ron Paul Supporter

“That has been blown out of proportion in every way!” she exclaims. “What happened is that I dropped my coffee and he helped me with it and was like, ‘Do you want to go to Baja Fresh?’… Not that I would be against dating a Ron Paul supporter, but he turned out to be very strange. He collected Barbie dolls. I called my girlfriends after and was like, ‘That’s weird, right?’ ”

On the wild child gene that seems to run in her family

It’s clear that Meghan inherited her father’s devil-may-care streak.

“Yeah, he was a little rebel when he was my age,” Meghan says. “I’d rather that than if he were boring.”

John wasn’t the original McCain hellion, though. Meghan mentions her grandmother, 96-year-old Roberta McCain, who occasionally joins her son on the trail. Meghan calls her grandmother “crazy in a good way.”

“Nana drives fast,” Meghan says. “She got pulled over for doing 112 in Flagstaff about a year ago.”

You can read the rest at the GQ website.

I think I like the McCain family. They aren’t dull, that’s for sure.

h/t Gone Hollywood Outside the Beltway

Hillary Clinton spent the St. Patrick’s Day weekend working the crowds at parades and giving speeches wearing a green scarf adorned with Irish clovers. Barack Obama spent the weekend with weak attempts to find the right set of words to get himself out of the corner he’s painted himself into by running as the candidate who transcends race while having spent the last twenty years attending a church that is astonishingly racist. I also imagine that he spent a large part of the weekend with spin doctors working on a speech he is to give tomorrow that is supposed to fix this entire situation for him. Words. Its all about words.

While the democrats were busily working on their respective campaigns, McCain made a surprise visit to Iraq. It is his eight trip there since the beginning of the war (did you know he’d been that many time? Right. I didn’t think so). He was traveling with fellow Senators Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.). While McCain visited Iraq and met with official there he stayed largely out of view. That doesn’t stop the leftists blogs from declaring that he was there for photo-ops and political gain.

The only political gain involved in his trip to Iraq had to do with progress in relations with the government of Iraq.

The visit included a briefing by senior U.S. military officials in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, according to a U.S. military official familiar with McCain’s schedule. The city has emerged as one of the last major urban strongholds of the Sunni insurgency. McCain then flew to Haditha, the western Iraqi town where, in November 2005, U.S. Marines gunned down as many as 24 Iraqi civilians. He walked through a market.

McCain was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. While Salih did not see McCain on Sunday, he said McCain’s “message has been consistent in the past saying Iraqis have to take responsibility and deliver on political progress.”

Salih said it was important for Iraqi politicians not to get involved in U.S. domestic politics but that his colleagues were “keenly aware of the debate in the United States.” Most important, he said, was a “solid long-term partnership” with the United States and a commitment that the American government “continue to look at Iraq as an important mission that cannot be allowed to fail.”

“Abandoning Iraq is not an option,” he said.

In an interview with CNN, McCain discussed the enormous stakes involved in the decisions that are being made in regards to Iraq.

Again he states the facts are on his side, that withdrawing troops too fast would undermine the security gains and create a climate where political reforms were even more unlikely.
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“We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to the predictions made by the Democrats and particularly Sen. [Barack] Obama and Sen. [Hillary] Clinton.

“I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it. Now will we be able to succeed fast enough? Will they be able to — al Qaeda be able to come back? That is a tough question. They are on the run, but they are not defeated.”

Crossposted at Blue Star Chronicles