Cindy McCain vs. Michelle Obama

My boyfriend and I broke-up so he can run back to his environmentalist/global warming advocate of an ex-girlfriend. That's fine, he just couldn't keep up with me, and I totally understand that. Last night sucked, and I cried way too much, but there's a new day ahead and I feel so much better already!

I am so buying 3 more bottles of Dior Addict lipgloss.

From PatDollard: Cindy McCain And Michelle Hussein: Polar Opposites

Michelle Obama in highschool!

AFP

Both fervently support their husbands on the campaign trail; both are financially independent; and both get acknowledged in the fashion world for their elegance.

But the similarities between Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, one of whom is likely to become the next US first lady in January, end there.

The more discreet Cindy McCain, 54, is heard mostly when she introduces her husband, Republican Senator John McCain, ahead of his presidential campaign speeches, wishing him well as she hands him the microphone.

Last week she told New York television NY1 in a rare interview that she sees her role in the background, now, and if and when John McCain wins the White House.

“I do not ever envision myself as being involved in the McCain administration, as it’s been put, but my husband and I do talk and I want to be a part of listening to his ideas, too,” she said.

Blonde and blue-eyed, petite and composed, the former beauty queen is a businesswoman who inherited her family’s large beer distribution empire and also oversees a number of philanthropic projects, some financed by her family foundation.

She married McCain, 18 years her senior, in 1980, weeks after he divorced the mother of his three first children.

They then had three children of their own, and in 1991 adopted a fourth, Bridget, a Bangladeshi girl orphaned in a cyclone.

Despite her low-key role, Cindy McCain has endured her share of nasty attacks.


Cindy McCain in Vogue
During her husband’s 2000 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination against George W. Bush, critics brought up her three-year addiction to prescription painkillers in the early 1990s.

More devastatingly, her husband’s opponents spread rumors that Bridget was the fruit of an adulterous union between John McCain and a black woman.

For a time in this year’s campaign she was pressed over not disclosing her personal income, as Barack and Michelle Obama and John McCain had done.

After insisting that it was a personal issue, last month she finally disclosed that she had earned six million dollars in 2006 — some 17 times her husband’s income and much more than the Obamas as well.

In February she made an uncustomary but biting jab at her opposite, Michelle Obama, who had come under attack for saying, regarding the surge of support for her husband, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

As Obama’s opponents calling his wife unpatriotic, Cindy McCain staked out her own stance:

“I always have been and will always be extremely proud of my country,” she said in a campaign appearance.

The episode underscored how Michelle Obama, 44, is already a big target in her husband’s campaign.

Trim and athletic, the mother of two daughters seven and nine, and in high heels nearly as tall as her husband, Michelle Obama is characterized by his foes as an angry black radical.

From a lower middle class family deeply rooted in Chicago’s black community, like her husband she went to an Ivy-League university — Princeton — and then on to prestigious Harvard Law School.

Weeks ago Barack Obama already took note of the apparent target on Michelle’s back.

“These folks should lay off my wife,” he said, to little effect.

Still circulating is the rumor that she made a speech using the denigrating term “whitey” in reference to Caucasians.

The conservative magazine National Review recently branded her “Mrs Grievance… America’s unhappiest millionaire.”

And on cable television’s Fox News in recent days, an anchor asked if her fist-to-fist smack victory gesture with her husband was a terrorist sign.

Fox followed that up days later by referring to her as “Obama’s baby Mama” — using a slang phrase that brands her an unwed mother.

Fox was pushed to apologize for the comments, but under that kind of attack, Barack Obama’s campaign has now put up a website just to dispel false stories about both of them, including a denial of the “whitey” comment.

Even so, she appears likely to play a more up-front White House role than Cindy McCain, if her husband wins the November 4 presidential election.

“She’s smarter, she’s tougher, and definitely more attractive than me,” Barack Obama says regularly.