CINDY McCAIN FOR PRINCESS! Now It's A Horserace

McCAIN FEELS YOUR PAIN (now that's a slogan)

I watched with glee all the signs around the Excel Center shouting "We Love Cindy!"--because my name is Cindy- it's Cynthia Louise so it could even be Cindy Lou for short. I hoped that the guy I love took it as a "sign." In fact it was about a thousand signs! God is hysterical sometimes. [I also have a brother, late father and nephew named John and god-kid cousin named Megan so I am naturally attracted to this family.]

Cindy McCain looked Regal in Marion Blue, and hit all the right notes on every front that counted for First Lady purposes. She is quite a lady. Not just your cupcake baking suzie homemaker-while she has quite a brood, but one who really exemplifies the classic golden hearted noblesse oblige with a purse that allows her to travel the world and bring compassion to the downtrodden, heal the sick, and raise the dead. Who knew she was all over Africa and Southeast Asia as a Senator's wife instead of on the cocktail party circuit. Even the most hardened critics had to be warmed by the story of her adopting a disfigured infant from one of Mother Theresa's orphanages in Bangladesh and making her one of her children with a mother's love- without asking her husband first (I like that part). She outdoes Princess Diana who never took an orphan home.

Like a good wife, she cleans up the men's messes in following after war to tend to it's victims and clean up it's minefields with the ease of picking up wayward socks. Cindy McCain is the closest thing this country has to Royalty. I want to look like her when I am -what...50-something? I vote for her for Princess. No one can not like Cindy McCain- no love her. Say it with me gayboys- love her!!!

The oddness of her running for First Lady with her husband was underscored by the fact that her vision of government is that it should just get "off our back!" That didn't really tell us
how she viewed her or her husband's philanthropic mission in terms of what government should implement. It tells us that she views the country as one in classic Republican mentality where the enterprising like her Dad can make a fortune to pass off to their beautiful daughters, establish foundations and do good in the world so long as government downsizes and minimizes any influence. That isn't the reality for most of the tens of thousands of people who filled Obama's Mile High Stadium who need government to be more than "on their side"- they need government to help. It isn't the reality for working moms across the country trying to pay bills, or for laid -off factory workers, or for the thousands of disabled vets returning to a country that doesn't understand well enough war torn traumatic brain injuries. They need government to help. That isn't the reality for anyone with a catastrophic illness like cancer and no medical insurance; they need government to help.

The Democrats have a different vision for government- they want government to fill in the inevitable and painfully showing cracks. They want government to function in the "brother's keeper" fashion Obama eloquently proclaimed from Denver's mountaintop. Obama sees the cracks and Republicans (as the stereotype goes) tend to walk over them with the same cavalier indifference that some people step over the sleeping homeless person by the bus-stop on their way home from work. The "ownership society" means "you are on your own" as Obama eloquently put it, and the measure of a man or woman is in their acquisitions rather than the humanity of their acts of compassion.

The McCains tried to show that they break the mold. They half succeeded.

The Republican mentality echoes the Nancy Reagan joke -just say "Get a House" to homeless people, or those suffering under the psychological burden of a "foreclosure" sign on their front lawn.

McCain's story is profoundly compelling; His humility inspiring, His suffering redemptive.
But the question still persists- is he rebel enough or is it just more of the same con job we have lived under for the last 8 years.

Exxon Mobil adds still ran throughout the breaks. Chants of "Drill Baby Drill" brought discomforting moans with visions of enormous rigs off Avalon, New Jersey and spills from
the Long Island Sound to Cape Hatteras killing horse shoe crabs and dolphins washing up on shores as Exxon Mobil profits exceed the entire gross national product of half the world's countries.

That Alaskan Governor who wasn't holding her infant baby for most of the event preaches on You-Tube about the billion dollars the Alaskan pipeline will bring to her community-and no doubt a quarter of which will find it's way into her and her friend's accounts as she proclaims herself to her Assemblies of God (visions of Ashcroft singing "As the Eagle flies" off-key) congregation "rich" want us to believe
she is a corruption outer and router--when the self-dealing potential desire couldn't be more evident here.

So the question remains, will this team buck the heavy hand of oil executives and other special interests running the country into the ground and leaving multitudes behind to fend for themselves in the interest of getting government "off our back!"

McCain's finding his value and vision in the Hanoi Hilton was moving.
I believe him when he says he hates war. I respect him when he fights against torture. I trust his sincerity and find it applaudable.
His family, thanks to his wife's fortune, is too rich to be bought--and his military family isn't in this love of country business for the money. But its a mixed bag of beans, because it provides a buffer to the ability to really see the suffering out there. One still does have the impression that there are matters from which he is too removed to be truly in touch with.

The question remains; will McCain really be a New Republican- Will he see through the cracks- or will he plaster them over and like the Nancy Reagan joke say to the single woman fighting foreclosure, or the
disabled vet with a traumatic brain injury, or with the unemployed outsourcing victim, or the ex-homeowner of Louisiana hurricanes, and all the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties- -get over yourself and
"just get a house!"

-and will we ever know or have they fixed the part about fixing elections with computer manipulations and secret source code that flips the switch on vote tallies yet?

The next two months should prove some of the more intensely interesting episodes in American History- and I, for one, will keep on the look-out for "We Love Cindy" signs and wonders.