Her Father’s Daughter (Mostly)

by Patrick Appel

Meghan McCain is not a fan of a certain plumber:

Shortly before McCain sat for this interview, Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, gave an interview to Christianity Today in which he complained about “queers” and declared, “I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.” Unprompted, McCain rails against the man her father’s presidential campaign touted as an American everyman and made a showpiece in the weeks before the election. “Joe the Plumber — you can quote me — is a dumbass. He should stick to plumbing.”

This bit about Cindy McCain was also news to me:

Being free of a presidential campaign’s constraints has liberated [Meghan] McCain to speak her mind, but the true impetus for her current gay rights activism was the passage of Proposition 8 in California. On election night last November, McCain was understandably consumed with the results of the presidential race and, like many, “assumed that Prop 8 wouldn’t pass.” The next morning, however, she woke up in an already sour mood made worse by her BGF (best gay friend) Josh “telling me that on top of everything else, Prop 8 passed.” Like many others, McCain was swept up in a collective sense of grievance, quickly concluding that making the GOP more gay-friendly would be foremost among her priorities. (For the record, Meghan isn’t the only member of the McCain clan to support gay marriage. “My mom was always for gay marriage, but I think me being so vocal about it has made her want to be more vocal about it,” she says. “She texted me: ‘Gay marriage passed in Maine!!’ ”)

Kirchick, elsewhere:

Interestingly, while McCain is more than happy to bash the man whom her father celebrated for weeks on end, the one part of the campaign McCain will not talk about is Sarah Palin.