McCain has obvious affection for Meghan. In interviews, he talks up her blog and credits her with introducing him to music beyond ABBA (his favorite band). For her part, Cindy says that Meghan represents the "artistic" side of the family, a designation that comes primarily from Meghan's college major, art history. This used to come up during the campaign, when the introductions of the candidate would begin with Cindy, who would mention—to great applause—the service of Jimmy and Jack McCain. Then McCain would take the stage and announce that his daughter was in the room, too—she "just graduated from Columbia University." Then he'd flip open his cell phone: "That's a picture of her and me at graduation. It's a $150,000 screen saver!" Laughter. Then, "Anyone have a job for an art history major?"

If you're looking to decipher where John McCain is coming from, as opposed to where he's going, the McCain you really need to reckon with, however, is his mother. Roberta McCain is tiny, one of those women who seem to fall in on themselves a bit as they get older. Yet her presence is enormous. She projects considerable charisma and has had an outsize impact on her son's life—and, by extension, American political life. She is the Rosetta stone of John McCain's psyche and the living, breathing explanation for all the contradictions that confound those who watch him work with women while working against women's interests and causes.

Roberta, now 96, was a wealthy (yes, her too), independent-minded 20-year-old college student when she married John's father, raising John with his brother and sister while Dad commanded a submarine in World War II. Fielding questions about the length of the Iraq war, McCain often falls back on an anecdote about that time. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he says, his dad said goodbye, got in a car, and left: "I rarely saw him again." As a navy admiral, McCain père was not much more involved in his sons' lives after the war. Roberta was a de facto single mother, and John has all of the genteel quirks of a strong male personality raised by a strong female one; he is both flirtatious and respectful, comfortable in what they used to call "mixed company," if more cautious about throwing around the occasional swear word.

Roberta is headstrong and independent but self-deprecating—a combination she seems to have passed to her son. She bought a car in France when she was refused a rental because of her advanced age. At this year's White House Correspondents' -Association dinner, she had to be argued out of walking to the venue from her nearby home. She reads two newspapers a day and is as up on politics as anyone else traveling with McCain—perhaps too much so. Just before the bitterly fought Republican primaries (yeah, they were!), John and Roberta appeared on Hardball, where she swerved well wide of the family-centric talking points. She took a swing at Mitt Romney's résumé-building item about saving the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, saying that "as far as the Salt Lake City thing, he's a Mormon. And the...Mormons of Salt Lake City had caused that scandal. And to clean that up...again, it's not even a subject." When McCain tried to intervene, Roberta huffed, "Well, that's my view. And you asked me."

When she was younger, Roberta used to go to Capitol Hill to watch legislative hearings; today, she watches on C-SPAN and enjoys button-holing various members of the press to ask them what they think about what's in the news. I think this frightens the campaign. Once, she took my arm for a little support on the way to a hotel conference room. "Are you coming in?" she asked. I told her I was headed to the press filing center. Her eyes lit up. "Oh? And where is that?" We had actually stopped just in front of it. I pointed, and she left my arm and started walking toward it as the babble of journalists leaked out the open door. She got a few steps and muttered, "How interesting...." before a McCain staffer threw himself in front of her: crisis averted.

This Is A Developing Story

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