Mavericky Meghan McCain Complicates Dad's Makeover

(April 28) -- On the campaign trail, presidential aspirants often trot out their children to burnish their credentials as wholesome parents. In the last round, Chelsea Clinton stumped for her mom, and Malia and Sasha Obama did a TV interview their dad later said he regretted.

But it was Meghan McCain who seemed to take on the role with real relish, accompanying her father on the campaign trail for nearly two years and blogging about her experiences. In her early 20s, blond and bubbly, she lent a vitality to her aging father, and her blog was "like a poll-tested perfect shout-out to the MySpace generation," Slate reported.

This election season, though, the daughter-father dynamic has shifted dramatically.

Facing a tough primary challenge from the right, the Arizona senator is trying to reposition himself as a traditional and stalwart conservative -- even as Meghan is taking the family's going-maverick tradition to new, headline-making heights. The latest example of the tensions this creates for McCain's re-election campaign comes courtesy of Arizona's tough new immigration law. John McCain has been defending the measure; the toughest in the country, it allows police officers to stop and demand documentation from anyone they deem a potential illegal immigrant. Meanwhile, Meghan, who now writes for The Daily Beast, has been attacking it.

"Let me say upfront that I do not support the bill that was signed by Gov. Jan Brewer," she opined. "I believe it gives the state police a license to discriminate, and also, in many ways, violates the civil rights of Arizona residents. Simply put, I think it is a bad law that is missing the bigger picture of what is really going on with illegal immigration. The concept that a law-enforcement official can stop an individual when 'reasonable suspicion exists that a person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States' is essentially a license to pull someone over for being Hispanic."

There was a time when John McCain may have voiced a similar sentiment, and he has long spoken out about reforming the country's immigration policy by securing borders and providing guest workers with a path to citizenship. He began pivoting to an emphasis on border control during the Republican primary leading up to the 2008 presidential election, and many believe his embrace of the new Arizona law now is also pure politics. McCain's challenger, former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth, enjoys tea party support and has called McCain's support of the Arizona law a "campaign-year" conversion.

Meghan's departure from her father's political views is not the first public rift in McCain family politics. In January, John McCain's wife, Cindy, appeared in pro-gay marriage advertisements ahead of California's vote to overturn a ballot initiative that banned gay marriage. Meghan has also spoken out for gay rights. But John McCain opposed gay marriage in the 2008 election and continues to hold that position. After Cindy McCain spoke out, the senator was moved to issued a statement indicating he still "believes the sanctity of marriage is only defined as between one man and one woman."

It's unclear if Meghan McCain has any electoral ambitions of her own, but she's clearly chosen a different public persona from that of another prominent Republican's daughter, Liz Cheney, who has steadfastly defended her father's tenure as vice president, going so far as to call President Barack Obama "un-American." (MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews recently referred to Liz Cheney as "the daughter of Dracula.")

Meghan does, though, have a personal brand to build, which she attends to both through her Daily Beast columns, a public feud with Ann Coulter, digs at the tea party and a Twitter feed that has been the source of other, visibility boosting controversies. Come August -- right in time for the Arizona primary vote -- there will also be a book to sell, titled Dirty Sexy Politics.

If Meghan's social-media-aided marketing efforts prove her to be a forward thinker, so too might her political positions. Speaking last year to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay pro-GOP organization, she said there was "a war brewing" in the GOP and that most "old-school Republicans are scared s---less of that future." It wasn't meant as such, but it could have been a eulogy for her father's political career. It would be a fitting tribute if Meghan McCain became the maverick that her father never really was.