Cindy is No Barbie

She’s so slight that a supporter injured her wrist just by shaking her hand. Since then she’s been wearing a fluorescent pink plaster cast which comes up to her forearm like a neat little glove. From Ohio to Minnesota, Cindy McCain hovers around the campaign like a rich heiress who has wandered into politics by mistake.

The Republican convention had been transformed into a massive display of open-heartedness – and an attempt at redemption for George Bush’s party. But at the opening of the convention on Monday, the Republican candidate’s wife was dressed with her usual elegance, in a saffron silk outfit with princess collar and a single row of pearls. Apparently nobody had dared to tell her that the campaign style this year is to dress down and sport the natural, “folksy” look, in an attempt to persuade the voters that this is their government, indeed that they themselves could even be in the government. Take Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, for example – only yesterday she was wearing reindeer skins, and now look at her, setting her sights on the official residence of the American Vice-President, the Naval Observatory on Washington’s most exclusive avenue.

Because of her size, blonde hair and always-immaculate outfits, the left have nicknamed Cindy “Republican Barbie.” That’s very unfair. She may be 17 years younger than her husband, but she had a life, and a fortune, of her own before she met him. He owes his political career to her, and if she follows him everywhere like a devoted wife, it’s only to keep his image consultants happy. It is obvious that she has no desire to place herself at center stage, nor for that matter to let the press go poking its nose into her complicated life.

While the Obamas offer the conventional image of a typical American family – one house, two kids, a stable couple – the McCains are another story. Cindy McCain is the daughter of a World War II veteran, who was shot down and wounded in his B-17 over the English Channel and returned home a hero, only to divorce the wife who had been waiting for him and marry another woman. Cindy herself married a hero of the Vietnam War who was shot down in his Skyhawk over Hanoi and who divorced his first wife on his return. The McCains have four children together, including two sons in the army. Senator McCain also has another three sons, two of them adopted. As for the number of houses they have, how can he be expected to remember? They all belong to Cindy – the apartment in Arlington where he stays when the Senate is in session, their other apartments in Phoenix, San Diego, and Coronada, California, their Sedona ranch which extends on either side of a river in Arizona – a total of 12 properties in all.

When he returned from Europe in 1945, Cindy’s father, James Hensley, sold alcohol on the black market, just barely escaped a jail term, and managed a racetrack before finally making his fortune in the beer distribution business. When he died in 2000, Cindy inherited a business with a turnover of $300m. At the funeral she told how her father had reacted when she had had an accident in the Porsche he gave her as a graduation present: instead of getting angry, he gave her a Mercedes. When she took up a teaching post in a deprived school and the car seemed a little inappropriate, he took pity on her again and bought her a Volkswagen. Today Cindy drives a Lexus with the personalized vanity plates “Ms. Bud” (as in Budweiser beer) – when she’s not using the company jet. (During some of the darker days of the primaries, the Senator used the company jet too, while denying that he ever had recourse to his wife’s money.)

Cindy Lou Hensley was 24 when she met John McCain, then aged 43, over a cocktail in Hawaii. They like to tell the story of how they both lied about their age – she said she was 3 years older, he that he was 4 years younger. He had completely white hair – a souvenir from his captivity in Vietnam – and more medals than her father. When Cindy married him in 1980, they agreed on separate ownership of their respective property. John was given a job in his father-in-law’s business, and it was his father-in-law’s contacts that launched him into politics. To this day the couple still files separate tax returns, and Cindy has finally agreed to make public a part of her tax return summary, after a long refusal and despite her repeated protestations that she would still prefer not to do so.

Cindy McCain has painful memories of the difficulties in which she found herself in the 1990s. Following an operation on her spine, she had been taking painkillers to which she had become addicted. To procure her fifteen pills a day, she had begun to help herself from the drug supplies of the NGO she founded. The affair was made public when the FBI launched an enquiry. These days Cindy McCain rarely gives her opinion on the state of the world, but she does a lot of traveling, from Rwanda to Vietnam, under the auspices of “Operation Smile,” a humanitarian initiative to help children born with a harelip. She was in Bangladesh in 1991 when she met little Bridget in one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages. She brought the little girl home with her for the operation, and decided during the plane journey to adopt her. The first John McCain knew about it was after she landed. So don’t be fooled by any of his macho campaign talk. Cindy is no Barbie.