The GOP is as out of gas as any political party in American history (except possibly the Prohibition Party). Clearly in the absence of some strategy change, the party’s future isn’t bright. Neither, judging by Meghan McCain, are the next wave of conservative pundits. McCain, who’s celebrity status rests on the fact that her Dad got trounced in a Presidential election, is taking up the mantle of the party’s party girl in a new cable TV series.
The series, which debuts on the new network Pivot TV this Saturday, is a combination talk show and unscripted series — half “The View,” half “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” It follows the exploits of one Meghan McCain, the daughter of the current U.S. senator from Arizona and one-time presidential nominee John McCain; she alternates between interviewing her guest and showing a slice of what it is like to be the daughter of a U.S. senator who lost the presidency in a landslide. She has been given 30 minutes a week on an aspirant cable network to prove that she has nothing to say.
Prior to the release of her current series, Meghan McCain was a columnist for the Daily Beast; her columns for the site, for which her last piece ran shortly after the last presidential election, included such pieces as “Yes, I Wear Fake Hair” and “The GOP’s House Hottie.” She interviewed Snooki, too!
Obsession with pop culture: Check! We’re well on our way to filling out the millennial scorecard. Prior to her present engagement with Pivot, when pressed on anything more troubling than “Jersey Shore” or her apparently ongoing and one-sided feud with the Palin family, McCain defaulted. (To her credit, she has spoken out consistently on behalf of gay rights; such speaking out, however, has generally tended toward the self-aggrandizing, as in her memoir of martyrdom “Dirty Sexy Politics” or her posing for a glam photo shoot to … benefit … gay people … somehow?) Asked, on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” to defend a point she made criticizing the Obama administration in the context of the Reagan years, McCain replied, “I wasn’t born yet, so I don’t know.”
This was not exactly calling up the ghost of Franklin Pierce. McCain was born in 1984, during the Reagan administration, a period of history about which information is readily available — particularly to a self-styled Republican pundit who has far more access than most Americans could ever dream of.
As a Salon commenter, kalpal, points out being burdened by knowledge and an education is just so left wing.
For American conservative political class the past is some kind of liberal hoax. Whereas older conservative pundits have a mythical, never existed, past to regress to – Meghan McCain doesn’t even have that.