There's an article in Newsweek titled "In Search of the Real Cindy McCain" where Cindy discusses her relationship with John, and after reading it, and mentally comparing it to what I know of Barack and Michelle Obama's relationship, I find I pity Cindy McCain more than anything else. . .
Over the 28 years of her often long-distance marriage to Capt. John McCain, USN (Ret.), she says she thought of herself as a Navy wife whose husband was off on tour—albeit on Capitol Hill instead of somewhere in the North Atlantic. "It was almost like a deployment," Cindy told NEWSWEEK. "What I told the kids from the time they were little is that their dad was deployed and serving our country in Washington."
Nice try on the spin Cindy, but he WASN'T deployed, and this is a marked difference from Senator Obama who would go home every weekend to see his daughters, and frequently talks about how much he misses them on the trail.
In fact, Michelle didn't shrink back when Barack was MIA:
There is an oft-cited passage near the end of The Audacity of Hope in which Barack admits that, after the arrival of their second daughter, Sasha, "my wife's anger toward me seemed barely contained. 'You only think about yourself,' she would tell me. 'I never thought I'd have to raise a family alone.'" This uncomfortable situation ground on under mounting layers of stress and resentment until, Michelle reveals, she came to terms with the reality that Barack had no intention of assuming a greater share of the domestic burden. As she told Vanity Fair last year, "One day I woke up and said, 'I can't live my life mad. This is not fun.' I thought the help I needed had to come from Barack. It wasn't that he didn't care, but he wasn't there. So I enlisted moms and baby sitters and got help with the housecleaning, and I built that community myself."
Cindy on the other hand, seems to just let John do as he pleases, and tries do deal in her own way:
There is a point later in the article where the author discusses John trying to be home more and calling frequently when he couldn't get home, but Cindy STILL felt very much alone, and would choose to leave the house and go out and leave him with the kids instead of spending family time together.
Cindy has sometimes likened herself to a single mother; now 54, she has often been far away from her husband during difficult moments, including two of three miscarriages she suffered in the 1980s. Years later, her husband did not notice when she became addicted to painkillers, a habit, she says, brought on in part by the stress of politics. In 2004, he was on the other side of the country when she suffered a stroke that left her partly debilitated. On her own, she learned to walk again. Cindy says she doesn't resent the time she has spent without her husband. It was her choice to stay in Arizona while he rose in Washington, and she says she knew when she married him that he was always going to "put country first."
I mean, John has missed out on a lot of painful episodes in her life. I think I admire her ability to not be bitter towards him for being so absent all the time, and maybe she likes it better that he's on the other side of the country. But I can't help but compare that to Michelle:
"I wasn't content with saying, 'You're doing important things in the world, so go off and be important and I'll handle everything else here'--because the truth is, if I did that, I'd probably still be angry." But, since even a garden- variety senator is only home a few days a week (and in hot demand even then), having Barack fluff and fold the occasional load of underwear is, in practice, largely symbolic. Running a household is a full-time job, and someone who only occasionally drops in on the effort can bring as much disruption as relief. So much for struggling together to achieve a work-life balance.
The article in Newsweek goes on to state the Cindy is not angry or bitter about the situation because she's never had to want for anything. It's not like she was struggling to pay bills, and she did have her own life. There really wasn't much mention of any struggle she may have had in raising their kids.
Even comparing the way they met/got together:
John and Cindy:
In the spring of 1979, Cindy joined her parents on a trip to Hawaii. At a Navy cocktail party, a cocky captain came up and introduced himself. John McCain was the Navy's chief liaison to the Senate in Washington. He was 41, but told her he was 37. Cindy was 24, but told him she was 27. By both accounts, it was love at first sight—though for McCain, it was far more complicated. He was a married father of three. His relationship with his first wife, Carol Shepp, was coming apart, and the two were separating, though he didn't divulge any of that to Cindy that first night.
Their relationship began with lies, I think it's amazing that they have stayed together as long as they have with such a foundation. Then again, they don't seem to see each other very much.
Compare that to Barack and Michelle:
They met in 1989 when Obama spent his summer as a first-year law student at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, and Michelle Robinson was the lawyer assigned to be his adviser.
Everybody at the firm had been buzzing about the smart, first-year Harvard Law School student, so she was expecting him to be "nerdy, strange, off-putting."
"But I was charmed," she said. "I was pleasantly surprised by who he turned out to be."
Still, because of their professional relationship, Michelle Robinson tried to fix Obama up with her friends. Then, halfway through the summer, Obama asked her out.
On their first date, they went to the Art Institute, strolled down Michigan Avenue and caught Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing."
"It was fantastic," Michelle Obama said in 2004. "He was definitely putting on the charm. ... It worked. He swept me off my feet."
The proposals:
John and Cindy:
On one of Cindy's visits to the capital, McCain proposed over drinks. They had known each other less than a year, but Cindy accepted immediately.
He wasn't even DIVORCED yet when he proposed. They got married a month after his divorce was final.
Barack and Michelle:
Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama had been dating for a couple of years, and she was tired of his endless debates about whether marriage still meant anything as an institution.
So when Obama launched into one of those discussions yet again over dinner at a fancy restaurant in 1991, Robinson lit into her boyfriend, lecturing him on the need to get serious in their relationship.
Then dessert came. On the plate was a box. Inside was an engagement ring.
While we know that Michelle refused to leave her support system and move to Washington after Barack became a U.S. Senator, Cindy decided to follow her husband, and really had a rough go of it in Washington:
Cindy struggled to be taken seriously in the capital. She went out for drinks with staff and tried to make friends with other congressional spouses, without much success. For the first time in her life, she was an outsider. She knew what people were saying behind her back. Some of her husband's own staff privately called her a trophy wife; his political opponents carped that he'd married her only for money.
Lonely and homesick for Arizona, Cindy sought comfort in starting a family. She had always wanted a lot of kids, but she suffered several miscarriages in their first years of marriage. The first time, she frantically tried to reach McCain on the House floor. He got the message in time to take her to the hospital. The two were apart the second and third time she miscarried. "Look, it was hard, but I can only view it as God's plan," she says. "I was never bitter about it, but I think he felt guilty." When Cindy found out she was pregnant again in early 1984, her doctors ordered her to stay off her feet and not travel. That was all the excuse she needed to leave Washington and move back to Arizona for good. Since then, she has seen her husband mostly on weekends, and travels to the capital only once or twice a year.
People are STILL calling her a trophy wife, and saying he only married her for money. It's not really fair, but sometimes perception beats out reality. I think we all forget that she's human and has feelings. While we call her a Stepford Wife (something she's apparently trying to fix by being more accessible and doing more interviews), she is still a wife and a mother. She may not want our pity, but reading this article, it's hard to not feel sorry for her. But you'd think with all she's going through, she'd be more understanding of Michelle's position since they both seem to be relatively private people who have been thrust into the spotlight because of their husband's political ambitions. Remember in 2000 when Cindy was being attacked? You would think that she would have more empathy for Michelle being attacked unjustly.
McCain lost the South Carolina primary after a vicious dirty-tricks campaign, in which his opponents smeared Cindy as a drug addict and spread rumors that Bridget was really McCain's illegitimate child. Cindy cried in full view of reporters. When her husband dropped out of the race, Cindy retreated once again to Arizona, furious. She now admits it took her a long time to get over it, much longer than her husband. "It was my daughter," she says. "I think any mother would agree with me. You can go after me, but stay away from my children."
There is a softer side to Cindy that never gets played up, they talk about her trip to Micronesia which opened her eyes to the deplorable medical facilities around the world, which inspired her to start her charity, and eventually led to their adoption of a little girl born with a cleft lip which they named Bridget.
I also found it interesting that Cindy blamed HERSELF for the Keating 5 scandal, and that scandal was what led to her addiction because she blamed herself for hurting John's reputation:
Cindy and her father had invested nearly $400,000 in a strip mall Keating owned. He had been a major contributor to McCain's campaigns and John and Cindy had vacationed at Keating's home in the Bahamas nearly 10 times, often flying down on one of Keating's private jets. McCain insisted he had paid for the use of the jet, but Cindy, in charge of the family's records, couldn't find the receipts. Ultimately, McCain received a mild rebuke for "poor judgment." But Cindy, convinced she had embarrassed her husband, was distraught. Under stress and still in pain after surgery, she began taking more of the pain pills doctors had prescribed. Soon she was addicted, taking up to 20 Percocets and Vicodins a day.
[snip]
Her mother was the first to notice something was wrong. Cindy looked terrible and had lost weight. "What's the matter with you?" she asked Cindy one night in 1992. Cindy confessed, and says she quit the pills cold turkey that day. But she didn't tell John. "I was scared," she told NEWSWEEK. "I didn't want to disappoint him."
To me that almost sounded like a wife who had been abused and blamed herself, I'm not saying John abused Cindy, but reading that part gave me that feeling.
I tried not to violate "fair use" but it was a 6 page article, there's a lot more than what I posted so go check it out. Overall, I came away with a different perspective on Cindy McCain, while she's no innocent, she's also not the Wicked Witch of the West. I think she deserves our sympathy more than our scorn. Some of the stuff was a little out there for me, like her not having a problem with John living clear across the country because she just loves America so much. But this article shows that she hasn't led a completely stress free life, and like Michelle, her greatest joy is her family and being with her kids. I think the two women have more in common than people realize, although Michelle comes off a bit more strongly. I really wish Cindy would take the high road when it comes to Michelle's "proud" comment.
As a woman, I did find that I respected John McCain less after reading this article. Yes, Cindy allowed him to be absent for all of those rough spots in her life, but to be absent for so many, on top of the way he treated his first wife, really makes John seem like a misogynist. Michelle would never let Barack get away with what Cindy seems to let John get away with, and more importantly I don't think Barack would WANT to be away from Michelle if she was going through some of the stuff Cindy went through by herself.
My point with this diary is not to extol the virtues of McCain, or to promote her in any way. It's in the interest of being more like the candidate we all support, there are two sides to every story, and not everyone who disagrees with your political views is evil. Cindy McCain has a very interesting story, it's more interesting than I would have expected.