TPM Cafe: Should Cindy McCain's Brain Damage Be a Campaign Issue?

oldpol

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Tue May-20-08 09:31 AM
Original message

TPM Cafe: Should Cindy McCain's Brain Damage Be a Campaign Issue?

Edited on Tue May-20-08 10:03 AM by oldpol

Should Cindy McCain's Brain Damage Be A Campaign Issue?

I don't know whether Americans care if a First Lady is mentally disabled - that's a question for McCain's pollsters.
What I want to know is why McCain would even subject his poor wife to the rigors of a presidential campaign and worldwide scrutiny in the first place. The question speaks directly to McCain's personal cruelty and unbridled ambition.

Although the true extent of the brain damage has not been publicly disclosed, Cindy McCain's 2004 stroke is not a secret.

In a very flattering September 2007 interview. Paul Alexander wrote about the stroke damage:

"In conversation, she will occasionally have trouble remembering certain facts, especially from the recent past, and if you look closely you realize she cannot make her right hand into a complete fist, which has affected her handwriting, if not her ability to grasp a knob. "It's not bad," she says, describing the damage to her hand. "I can function. I have short-term memory loss. I can remember all the major details of my life, but I sometimes can't remember what happened last week."

I suspect that John McCain, viewed his wife's stroke more in terms of how it would affect his bid for the presidency than else.

From a January 2005 Larry King show:

"MCCAIN: I was the one at home that everyone came to to program their computers, fix their phones, do anything electrical, technical, anything on the computer. I can't get near it now. I'm overwhelmed by it.

And it's weird for me. And I might also say, I suffer from migraines also. And your last caller that called in -- and I just had an episode about a week and a half ago, where I didn't know, I thought I was having another stroke. It was a different kind of...

KING: Has the senator been very sympathetic?

MCCAIN: Yes. And I -- please don't -- let me explain that. He was very confused in the beginning. He didn't -- like everyone in the family, how could it happen to my wife? I'm 18 years older than she is. It doesn't happen to someone that's younger than you are. So on his behalf, I think he's trying to understand all this. It's a lot for him to take in."

In October 2007, Cindy McCain was hobbling around South Carolina as the result of a fall down in a Phoenix grocery store. Was her fall caused by her brain damage? Is the question any of our business?

Inevitably, the issue of the extent of Cindy McCain's brain damage will enter the public arena. So far, Mrs McCain has only had to field softballs lobbed at her by sympathetic journalists. Can the McCain campaign limit her public appearances to three-minute soundbites until November? I don' think so, not in today's political environment.

Some wag is bound to suggest a debate between Michelle and Cindy. And the jokes and parodies are bound to get a lot meaner from there.

Why, Senator McCain, would you do this to your wife?
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/02/should-cindy-mccains-brain-dam.php