Subject: John McCain's First Wife
I have checked this and it appears to be true.
John McCain mentions that his greatest failure in life was his first marriage. I guess he had to say something because his first wife, Carol, is now going public with their story.
You don't hear much about the first wife, Carol McCain McCain likes to illustrate his moral fiber by referring to his years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-
old former US Navy pilot tribute to his current wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children. But the first Mrs. McCain casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator's presidential campaign. She is seldom heard of despite being the mother three of McCain's children.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his incarceration in Vietnam, the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting.
But when McCain returned home in '73 to fanfare and handshakes from Richard Nixon, he saw that his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded into a telegraph pole on Christmas
Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
Carol remained hospitalized six months and received life-saving surgery. In order to save her legs, surgeons had to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and forced to use a catheter. Today, she stands at just 5' 4' in
and still walks with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of suffering.
For almost 30 yrs, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, John McCain and their divorce. But last week at her home in Virginia Beach, she discussed how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, a very rich woman 18 years his junior and heir to an Arizona
lucrative beer distribution fortune, one month later. Carol notes that their marriage ended because John McCain didn't want to be 40, he wanted to be 25.
In 1979 - while still married to Carol - he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued young Cindy, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage to his first wife.
SOME OF MCCAIN'S ACQUAINTANCES ARE LESS FORGIVING. THEY PORTRAY THE POLITICIAN AS A SELF-CENTERED WOMANIZER WHO EFFECTIVELY ABANDONED HIS CRIPPLED WIFE TO 'PLAY THE FIELD'. THEY ACCUSE HIM OF FINALLY SETTLING ON CINDY, A FORMER RODEO BEAUTY QUEEN, FOR HER MONEY.
Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is a leading campaigner for veterans' rights, said: 'I have been following John McCain's career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong
with this guy: 'When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her right away. EVERYBODY AROUND HIM KNEW IT. HE MET CINDY AND SHE WAS YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL AND VERY WEALTHY. AT THAT POINT MCCAIN JUST DUMPED CAROL FOR SOMETHING HE THOUGHT WAS BETTER.'
McCain is the classic opportunist.
Sampley notes that McCain is always reaching for 'attention and glory'.
After he came home, CAROL WALKED WITH A LIMP. SO HE THREW HER OVER FOR A POSTER GIRL WITH BIG MONEY. And the rest is history.'
FINALLY, ROSS PEROT, A BILLIONAIRE TEXAS BUSINESSMAN, AND FORMER
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, PAID CAROL MCCAIN'S MEDICAL BILLS. ROSS PEROT
BELIEVES THAT BOTH CAROL MCCAIN AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WERE TAKEN IN BY A
MAN, WHO IS UNUSUALLY SLICK AND CRUEL - EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF MODERN
POLITICS.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/right-fight-wrong-word/index.html
So, Dan Schnur is the next in line to take a stab at Barack Obama by twisting his words to mean something they don't. We shouldn't be particularly surprised by this. Schnur helped run John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. So we know where he stands.
Schnur's "new" addition to the debate is a response to the book, "What's the matter with Kansas?" Schnur notes the following about voters who go against their own best interests by supporting candidates on the basis of 'single issues':
"For many people, that’s certainly true. But there are plenty of other voters who don’t necessarily base their votes solely on jobs and taxes, and many of them are quite financially successful. They have determined their political affiliations largely as a result of the same continuing battles over abortion, guns and same-sex marriage that have drawn so many working-class voters to Republican candidates over the years. The only difference is the side of the fight they’ve chosen. It’s hard to argue that a wealthy pro-choice Democrat is any less of a values voter than a pro-life construction worker who votes Republican."
To which, I respond, "DUH!"
If the shoe doesn't even belong to you, then don't complain about how it doesn't fit you.
Schnur seems intent to stir up outrage at Obama's comments, which were directed at a very small minority of swing voters who are cynical about politics as usual, and frustrated about the fact that government doesn't seem responsive to their most important issues. Obama wasn't saying anything like, "All values-based voters are naive," or, "Republicans are closed-minded." Let's look again at what Obama actually said:
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Now ... notice what Obama didn't say. He wasn't talking about "working class voters" or "uneducated voters" or "Republican voters" or "Democratic voters" or "values voters". Unlike Karl Rove, Obama didn't try to divide people into "beer drinkers" or "wine sippers" or "latte drinkers" or "pro-life" or "pro-choice". He's looking at another dynamic - cynicism because government has made empty promises they didn't keep. And the biggest issue for our democracy today is cynicism - people just aren't involved in the political process like they should be. When 40% of people don't even bother to vote, you've got a problem. When only 48% of the 60% of people who vote are supporting the winning candidate, that means you've got about 30% of American voters supporting a particular candidate.
And that, my friends, is the issue. That's Obama's heart - Project Vote, getting 150,000 new voters registered in Chicago back in the early 90s, community organizing, helping people to get involved in the process again, going directly to the people instead of engaging in "top-down" political gamesmanship. And regardless of who wins and who loses, what matters most is that people are getting involved in the political process again.
And that's the sub-text of all this "outrage" about Obama's comments. The Republican National Committee, the McCain campaign, the Clinton campaign ... their entire message is designed to tell people, "Obama's just another ordinary politician."
There's just one problem. The facts don't fit.
Schnur tries to paint Obama as naive and closed-minded. "A more experienced and open-minded candidate would recognize and respect the foundations on which these values are based."
And this is the height of hypocrisy. Because Obama truly understands the "foundations on which these values are based". He knows that there is, like Ed Rendell said, "a small minority of voters" who will not vote for a candidate simply because he's black. Obama realizes that the core issue for many voters is not "the issues" but rather a disbelief in the power of government to help people. And that belief hasn't been there since Bobby Kennedy's death in 1968.
Obama has plenty of experience - being raised in Indonesia to learn that many Muslims are not extremists, growing up as a biracial child who is neither black nor white, but both at the same time, having a single mom on food stamps, going to high school in Hawaii, having a little trouble with his own cynicism, not being accepted by the majority white culture or the minority black culture, attending Columbia University and studying international relations at a top-notch school, doing community organizing for churches in Chicago's south side, serving as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, working for Project Vote, serving a minority district in the Illinois State Senate, teaching constitutional law at one of the top conservative law schools in the country ... how much experience do you need?
Time will tell whether the "elitist" meme will stick. But this white Evangelical pro-life Tennessean male is not convinced. I think that the entire GOP strategy is disingenuous, cynical, dishonest, insincere, and wrong.
All that Dan Schnur did is make me more certain that the Republican party will say anything to dupe voters into voting against Obama.
