Meet the McCains

ST. PAUL
AS HURRICANE Gustav made landfall on the Gulf Coast yesterday morning, John McCain's campaign dispatched the candidate's wife, along with Laura Bush, to meet with Louisiana's delegation to the Republican National Convention. Later in the day, Cindy McCain stepped forward once more, by joining Laura Bush a second time to lead a fund-raising drive for disaster relief. This appearance only underscored how low-key, and how uncontroversial, the Arizona senator's wife has been in the campaign thus far.

John McCain has built his bid, of course, on his military background and his national-security credentials. The convention hall here is festooned with white stars that evoke military insignia, and most large, flat surfaces are emblazoned with the slogans "service" and "country first."

Even so, enshrouding candidates in images of happy family life has become a regular function of quadrennial conventions. And as the McCains introduce themselves to the general electorate, they have an easier standard to meet than their Democratic counterparts.

A free-floating animus toward Barack Obama's supposed exoticism has come to rest on Michelle Obama, who has been portrayed as an unreconstructed campus radical. As a result, her speech was one of the most-watched moments of the Democratic convention, and in it she took pains to portray herself as middle-class and Middle American, as a concerned working mother with no thought greater than inculcating strong values into her two daughters.

Presidential spouses are expected to devote themselves to uncontroversial humanitarian causes, and political candidates suffer if their families come across as anything but supportive and unobtrusive. On paper, Cindy McCain, head of a family beer-distribution business, presents more opportunities for bad publicity than Michelle Obama's professional career as a lawyer. And yet something about the Obamas gets that Illinois family branded as alien.

Then again, the expectation of picket-fence traditionalism cuts both ways, because hardly any family meets that standard. When news broke yesterday that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, it prompted some grumbling among convention-goers here that McCain had failed to vet his running mate properly (McCain has said he knew of the daughter's pregnancy).

Maybe this means the Republican candidates will fall under the same wilting spotlight that the Obamas endured last week. Far better would be a recognition that the all-American family tableau required of all candidates can include families of all sorts.