Candidates' children

There's a quite a fuss being made about Obama "exploiting" his children by having them interviewed on Access Hollywood.


I'm struck that this complaint is fairly bizarre. He has kids, people are interested in them. In contrast, a lot of folks don't even know that John McCain has children, or perhaps they know he and his wife adopted a girl b/c she was exploited in a truly ugly way by the Bush campaign during the election in 2000. But he, in fact, has SEVEN children - he adopted his first wife's two sons (Doug and Andrew) and they had a daughter (Sidney) together. He and his second wife have two sons (Jack and Jimmy) and two daughters (Meghan and Bridget).


I discoved by reading this profile of Cindy McCain in Newsweek magazine that she stayed in Arizona all these years while he lived mostly in Washington. It's none of my business how they arrange their family life, but I do think the type of family life a person has reflects on their character. McCain has been a long distance father (to put it politely), and his wife has mostly raised their 4 children without him (and obviously his first wife raised their 3 kids on her own).



Andrew is a pilot for American Airlines, Doug works for Cindy's family business (the Henley company) and Sidney is a music company exec, living in Canada. Jack attended the Naval Academy, and the youngest son, Jimmy, joined the Marines and served in Iraq (McCain is always praised for not "exploiting" his son's service). His daughter, Meghan, has her own blog. This is the photo she has posted there on the profile page (though she looks much younger and less, er, worldly, in other photos on the site). => His youngest daughter (who is 16) was adopted from one of Mother Teresa's orphanages in Bangladesh - Cindy McCain is on the Board of Operation Smile (that fixes cleft palates for children in developing nations) and the daughter was a (rejected) patient at the clinic.