On the second night of the Democratic convention, Joe Biden, a longtime family friend of the McCains, has earned the de facto backing of McCain matriarch Cindy, who has narrated a video featuring the famous friendship between the Arizona senator and the Democratic nominee, who spent decades serving alongside John McCain while representing Delaware.
The McCains embody a generation of what the GOP once believed in. For worse, their detractors point toward the military hawkishness of McCain and his allies. For the undeniably better, their fans point toward McCain’s unadulterated decency, his commitment both to his country as an abstract concept, for which he paid with his body and freedom as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and to his fellow countryman, exemplified by his insistent refutations of allegations that Barack Obama, then his presidential challenger, was somehow less American or less deserving of the Oval Office.
Unlike Mitt Romney, who operates as the lord of an independent fiefdom, the McCains are still proven kingmakers of cold, hard, Arizona politics and in the media, given daughter Meghan’s vast media influence as a conservative panelist on The View. (Though Meghan has not announced any endorsement of Biden.) The McCains crucially did not campaign for Martha McSally in her original Senate race after she famously snubbed the late senator in the hopes of not facing fire from President Trump’s base, and while Doug Ducey debated who to tap to fill John Kyl’s seat, Cindy McCain’s name was seriously floated by GOP insiders. Arizona promises to be one of the states that Democrats hope to flip.
Unlike the Lincoln Project grifters and Trump Derangement Syndrome victims who have decided to not just celebrate Biden but back every court-packing socialist running against the most centrist Republicans in the House and Senate, she won’t soon trade principle for popularity. I highly doubt you’ll ever see Cindy McCain cutting an ad for Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So it is precisely because of that fact that Cindy McCain’s endorsement is one of the only anti-Trump conservative endorsements that will practically matter.
