I will vote for Obama because I do feel he is qualified for the job, and McCain would subject us all to four more years of the same, which I do not think this country can survive. If you look back at the condition of this country before Bush took office and compare it to the way things are now, it is plain to see that we've been in a downward spiral ever since Bush was elected.
And, if McCain were to die in office, which at his age is a possibility, I cannot see Sara Palin as our president. I can see Joe Biden as president, but not Palin. She stands for everything I oppose.
I read this article this morning, and I want to share it with you.
The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind
By Sharon Churcher
Last updated at 1:45 AM on 08th June
2008
Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the
White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and
his Republican rival Senator John McCain.
While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the
American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food
stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will
present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not
so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to
rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.
Forgotten woman: But despite all her problems Carol McCain
says she still adores he ex-husband
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as
a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family
values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful
blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s
presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite
being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.
And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than
Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol,
who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in
1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture
in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed
at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a
handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a
terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a
telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by
the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving
surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons
had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it
her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use
a catheter.
Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain
came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little
resemblance to her old self.
Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced
limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face
is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.
For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the
accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now
lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington,
she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy,
18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month
later.
Golden couple: John and Cindy McCain at a charity gala in
Los Angeles
Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as
part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no
bitterness,’
she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five
inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was
just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.
‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be
25. You know that happens...it just does.’
Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the
politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled
wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former
rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer,
while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had
impeccable political connections.
He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in
Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most
distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both
admirals.
But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group
of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’.
His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding
floozy nicknamed ‘Marie, the Flame of Florida’ to a tobacco heiress.
Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor
upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis
classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before
renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain.
It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he
was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.
‘He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children,’ recalled
another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a
bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.
The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney,
was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning
to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’
before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.
He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of
Tonkin.
What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi
in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by
an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.
War hero: McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US
in 1973 after his five years as a PoW in North Vietnam
Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was
regularly tortured and mistreated.
It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third
without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some
presents at a friend’s house.
It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in
terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the
windscreen.
After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may
never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain
about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t
want to tell him.’
H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate
and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.
When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to
little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he
was overjoyed to see Carol again.
But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance.
At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s
fine.’
He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW
helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the
water.
‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. But as
a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.
Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A
sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.
But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing
and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.
McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without
going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but
others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.
He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an
admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were
turning to politics.
In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in
Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to
see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.
Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says
Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.
‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans
were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’
Another friend added: ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made
her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone
through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’
Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the break-up was Carol’s
decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.
Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all
his campaigns. ‘He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he
could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy,’ one observed.
McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to
live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He
also agreed to pay her alimony and child support.
A former neighbour says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington
and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. He said: ‘My impression was that she found
the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking.’
Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their
1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to
local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to
Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.
And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t
forget his treatment of his first wife.
Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a
leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John
McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something
wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.
‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he
started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew
it.
‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At
that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.
‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no
character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it
all belonged to Carol.’
One old friend of the McCains said: ‘Carol always insists she is not bitter,
but I think that’s a defence mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt
because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her
medical care for the rest of her life.’
Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she
agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicise her
support for the man who abandoned her.
Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a
disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband.
‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured us. ‘We are still good friends. He is the best
man for president.’
But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes
that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who
is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.
‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and
glory,’ he said.
‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a
poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’
- Additional reporting by Paul Henderson in Virginia Beach and William
Lowther in Washington
On a personal note, Dave, it's good to hear from you again.