Meghan McCain's 15 Minutes

Meghan McCain, I was so wrong about you. Just a little more than a year ago, during her father’s failed campaign for president, I wrote a piece for Slate about how McCain [2] had learned to cannily manipulate her very blond public image to its full advantage while still maintaining a modicum of privacy. I even called her shrewd.

That was before she joined Twitter. When I wrote about her in 2008, I was impressed with the amount of agency she appeared to exert over her own image, but that’s where I was most wrong. She’s not a woman coolly dealing with the hand of celebrity she was dealt; she’s a lost little girl grasping at fame, working out her insecurities on an unnecessarily large stage.

Nothing illustrates this better than this week's McCain controversy, when she set the Internet a-twitter [3] by posting a self-snapped picture of herself holding an Andy Warhol biography with the two most prominent parts of her below-the-neck anatomy very much in evidence. Reaction was swift and harsh, with Twitter users seizing the occasion to tell the 24-year-old to cover up and to acquire some class, doled out with all the politeness one has come to expect from the Internet. By Thursday, McCain began posting frantic messages about quitting Twitter [4] and apologizing for the picture (which she took down, put back up, took back down …).  

The problem isn’t that McCain posted a provocative picture of herself online—silly and tacky as it might be, lots of young women do it. It’s not that she has large breasts and is proud of her body. And it’s not that she’s using her looks and her “brand” to further her “career”—if she decides she wants to be Julia Allison [5], fine, let her be. The problem is that she’s trying to have it both ways. She wants to be taken seriously on matters of policy and to have a voice in the Republican Party—at least so she tells us—and people seem more than willing to give her one, but she also wants to go on the Tyra Banks show and talk about her hair extensions.

The controversy happened to make the rounds on the same day that Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post devoted a column to the newly influential ladies of the GOP, naming McCain alongside Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Liz Cheney [6]. Like most commenters who’ve written about McCain, Parker said that she’s fresh and hip and heterodox and so can help revamp the GOP brand for young voters, although there’s no evidence that she’s done anything of the kind.

In fact, McCain’s career as a pundit has always been driven by body-image controversies—a somewhat adolescent issue—more than her occasional swats at the future of the GOP. By Thursday, Anna North of Jezebel [7] rushed to her defense, saying that slightly edgy PR is good for the GOP, adding that the exposure—yes, in both senses—drives traffic to McCain’s Daily Beast column, which she began writing after Laura Ingraham called her fat. Indeed, McCain’s very place as an opinion columnist, such as it is, was precipitated by her ruminations on the way she, as a (young, attractive, non-skinny) woman is treated in the media (a drum she’s continued to beat [8]). That’s precisely what makes this bit of North’s argument particularly disingenuous:

It's tempting to say that she must've known people would be looking at her tits. However, McCain is clearly well-endowed in this department, and a tank top that might look like demure sleepwear on a smaller-chested woman looks revealing on her. Yes, she's been on camera a lot, but she's also 24 years old, and she's probably not used to being photographed without someone around to style her. She might have been legitimately unaware that her photo looked kind of cheesecakey.

No. She put it up precisely because it looked kind of cheesecakey, and that’s what got the Internet up in arms. If you look beyond the glaring headlights, she looks quite pretty—flirty eyes, with her chin angled down in that certain way that people who take a lot of pictures of themselves have learned is flattering. And if you look at the glaring headlights, as it is hard not to do, you realize she must have positioned herself just so, for optimum effect. McCain was delighted with how she looked, and so she sent out what amounted to a soft-core mass-sext [9] to her 65,000-plus followers, a clear cry for attention, whether of the good or bad sort.

It’s a viscerally adolescent move. But McCain is in the adolescent phase of her fame—it’s upon her in its full dimensions, but she doesn’t quite know what to do with her newfound powers. Nor does realize with any clarity how the world perceives her, despite being obsessed with that very perception. She’s acquired some friends who might be a bad influence. (Ahem, Tila Tequila [10].) When she’s not dressed in the slimming black pantsuit she dons for virtually every television appearance, she dresses with all of the subtlety of a 13-year-old set loose in a Hot Topic. In her columns in the Daily Beast, her television appearances, and her tweets, she presents herself as heroically self-confident—in the bombastic manner favored by teenage girls who are so cripplingly racked with self-doubt that it takes a missile-silo full of oomph to cover it up.

McCain seeks reinforcement at every turn, which is why she has developed an apparent addiction of sorts to Twitter, with its instant feedback, its false but warming sense of community, and, of course, the easy launching pad it provides for fame. And so now, even though the feedback’s turned bad, she can’t quit Twitter [11]—really, she’s amped up her presence, twittering all day Thursday with Lohan-esque hysteria about how upset she is, how she’ll quit the service, and who’s persecuting her now. But her Twitter compulsion also seems pathological and more than a little sad.

It all gives her a reason to write, of course, manufacturing for herself digital straw men who she can take down in her column. (Broadsheet implies that she manufactured the controversy to draw attention to a column she’d written earlier in the week about celebrities and body image [12].) After the Thursday onslaught, she rushed to press with a Friday morning Daily Beast response that parsed the sentiments of her Twitter feed: “For years I have struggled to accept the fact that the way I look in a tank top comes off more ‘sexual’ than a flat-chested woman,” McCain complains [13]. “And once again I was reassured by the media”—that faceless demon!—“that someone with my cup size should always be covered up. Or what, I’ll be seen as a slut?”  

But there is nothing about the image she’s manufactured that telegraphs seriousness. It might be a brave new world, but you still don’t see Gail Collins or Peggy Noonan flashing cleave in their author photos. That’s not because they’re old or unhip or because we’re all prejudiced against unbridled feminity. It’s simply that often, especially in a field like media, in which image is paramount, form really should follow function.

Serious jobs demand serious behavior, and McCain hasn’t given the slightest indication that she understands that. Maybe there would be less of a furor over her chest if she backed her physical goods up with intellectual ones. When she went on Bill Maher's show [14] earlier this year, it was under the premise of being a commentator. But when Democrat Paul Begala challenged her on a point, she backed off from any obligation to express an informed opinion, claiming that she was “just the blonde sitting here.” Begala got peeved, as he had a right to be—either she was there to play ball or not. Cheerleaders stay on the sidelines.

I wonder how far into the Andy Warhol bio McCain delved the other night. She’s certainly taken to heart his vision of what it is to be famous, but she hasn't figured out the role she plays in the production of her own fame—she's more Factory Girl than master manipulator. Kathleen Parker is using her to shape the thrust of the GOP’s platform. The View is using her to get ratings. Tina Brown is using her to get page views. Jezebel is using her to call foul on sexism. McCain doesn’t have a vision for the GOP that she’s putting forward; she has a persona she’s tentatively trying out on a very public stage, and others are seizing on the bits of it they know will be useful to them.