Miss McCain to You

Dirty Sexy Politics
by Meghan McCain
Hyperion, 208 pp., $23.99

Meghan McCain, daughter of John McCain, had a knack for many things during the 2008 campaign: walking in super-high heels, dropping f-bombs, and spilling the contents of her suitcase (undergarments included) in a hotel hallway at the very moment campaign bigwigs walked by. Awkward moments like these abound in Dirty Sexy Politics, a lively account of her experiences working on—and blogging about—her father’s presidential campaign.

Apparently John is not the only McCain with a penchant for straight talk: “Aside from my shit detector and gut, which, thank God, were often on target, I knew very little about campaigning,” she writes. Now 25, Meghan McCain looks back on the campaign as a valuable learning experience, one that exposed her “to the inner workings and culture of the Republican party,” and what she saw disturbs her: “The base has moved to the Far Right and, sadly, it seems to be dying there. Rather than the party of openness and individual freedom, it is now the party of limited message and less freedom.” In short, McCain believes that today’s Republican party is not hospitable to people like her: moderate Republicans “not conservative enough” for the party. Like father, like daughter?

Unfortunately, the beautiful and fashion-savvy McCain—who describes her personal style as “more like Gwen Stefani than Tricia Nixon Cox”—seems more interested in telling us about the outfits and hairstyles she donned for campaign events than how, exactly, she’d make over the Grand Old Party. But then again, this is not a campaign handbook; it’s a cheeky tale of a “diva who fell to Earth,” a story of how life on the campaign trail is never glamorous, even for the candidate’s daughter.