A Question of Character?

Without question race is playing a major factor in the 2008 presidential elections and the man who's elected will impact the cultural fabric of this nation in a variety of significant ways.

John McCain (pictured with second wife Cindy McCain) tends to talk in lofty non-specifics that make it very difficult to gauge where he'll stand on issues that directly impact race. But he does talk about character quite a bit.

Sharon Churcher wrote an interesting piece on the London Daily Mail Website on John McCain's first wife Carol that offers insight a real look into his character and what kind of person he really is.

She must've been in a rush to get the article finished, as most of it seems to be plagiarized from an extensive article about McCain's life on Wikipedia.org.

The mainstream media has until this point avoided any mention of McCain's first wife, whom he divorced after he returned home to the US from Vietnam to find her disfigured from a Christmas eve car accident. He met his 2nd wife, a former swimsuit model and the daughter of a politically-connected Arizona multi-millionaire who would help engineer his move into the political arena.

No wonder Cindy stays out of the media spotlight silently with that grin on her face.

I don't know Cindy McCain personally but at this point Michelle Obama comes off as more intelligent, well spoken, well educated, confident and strikes me as more in the mold of what a real First Lady is and should be.

With her secretive nature and reluctance to release her tax records for public scrutiny Cindy McCain often comes off as something of a trophy-wife living a privileged insulated life off of daddy's money.

But the facts say otherwise. She's played an active role running her father's business, a beer distributorship. She actively serves on charities that focus on clearing mines around the world and helping poor children with severe oral surgery needs; in fact she adopted a girl from Bangladesh with a severe cleft palette at the behest of Mother Teresa.

I must confess there's much more to Cindy than I thought there was and I wonder why the media seems not to report any of the positive sorts of things she's done. Or the negative for that matter.

Snopes.com reports that she became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet after two back surgeries and a DEA investigation found she used a medical charity she founded to illegally obtain large amounts under false names - she ducked prosecution by striking a deal with the Justice Department. No doubt, Senator McCain's character aided in that episode, one you probably won't hear on Fox News anytime soon.

Meanwhile Fox News trumpets the results of a recent Rasmussen Report that shows 1,000 people polled viewed Michelle Obama more unfavorably than Cindy McCain - a poll which also showed the approval rates for both women were nearly even at 49% and 48%.