The afternoon before the White House Correspondents Dinner, I sat down with Meghan McCain, daughter of the erstwhile presidential candidate, to profile her for OUT magazine. McCain has earned herself a remarkable bit of controversy in the relatively short period of time that she's emerged as a pundit, picking fights with the likes of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and...well, a huge chunk of the Republican Party. Here's what she had to say about Joe the Plumber:
Yet even as the balance begins to shift, the old guard is still yapping in the foreground. Shortly before McCain sat for this interview, Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, gave an interview to Christianity Today in which he complained about “queers” and declared, “I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.” Unprompted, McCain rails against the man her father’s presidential campaign touted as an American everyman and made a showpiece in the weeks before the election. “Joe the Plumber -- you can quote me -- is a dumbass. He should stick to plumbing.”
Interestingly, while McCain is more than happy to bash the man whom her father celebrated for weeks on end, the one part of the campaign McCain will not talk about is Sarah Palin.
--James Kirchick