The serene presence of Cindy McCain

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Cindy McCain looks like fear never dares enter her mind, but there she was telling about a hundred people that she had been scared to death.

It had nothing to do with jitters about speaking to a national audience from the Republican National Convention. At a breakfast for delegates in Minneapolis this week, she was recalling her fear as a mother when her son Jimmy was deployed to Iraq.

"I never had a way to know if he was safe," she said. You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody even rattled a coffee cup.

Real emotion always trumps the phony stuff of political stagecraft, a fact that the organizers of national political conventions seem not to grasp.

Last week, the Democrats brought us a flashy rendition of the life of Barack and Michelle Obama. This week, Republicans wrapped John McCain in the American flag. Even when the script got changed by Hurricane Gustav, the GOP convention still felt scripted.

Tonight, though, after dozens of speakers have extolled his virtues, McCain finally gets to speak for himself. Will the old maverick reveal more of his humanity?

In a week in which Sarah Palin, 44, McCain's choice for vice president, has ridden a rollercoaster of news about her family, Cindy McCain, 54, has been a serene presence onstage and behind the scenes at the Republican convention. On Monday, she and first lady Laura Bush appealed for donations for Hurricane Gustav victims.

In rolling out the McCain story, speakers have focused almost entirely on his courage and character as a POW nearly 40 years ago. They've said almost nothing about his family life or subsequent quarter century in Washington. His signature legislation, the bipartisan McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, is so unpopular with Republicans that it has gone largely unmentioned.

The one thing most people know about Cindy McCain is that she's vastly wealthy, having inherited one of the largest beer distributorships in the country. The McCains have a modern, commuter marriage, with her living in Arizona and he in Washington. She spends time on humanitarian and charitable work, traveling to Rwanda, Vietnam and Georgia this summer.

Her life has not been without its trials. She recovered from an addiction to pain killers after disc surgeries.

She was 24 when she met McCain, 42, a dashing and married Navy officer and the father of three. They married the next year after his divorce, with a prenuptial agreement that keeps their finances separate. She reluctantly released a summary of her 2006 return earlier this year.

The McCains have four children, including an adopted daughter, Bridget, who needed several surgeries for a cleft palate. Cindy adopted Bridget in Bangladesh without telling her husband. She said that when she presented their newest family member, McCain "never stepped back or took a breath."

These are the kinds of stories that most people don't want to tell because they are so personal. Privacy, though, Sarah Palin learned, is the first casualty when someone runs for high office. Better to tell the story yourself than leave it to the spin machine.

(Marsha Mercer is Washington bureau chief of Media General News Service. E-mail mmercer(at)mediageneral.com)