Straight talk from McCain’s mom

It had been more than a year in the making, this meeting between Roberta McCain and me.

The smart guys who managed her son’s presidential campaign got all queasy at the thought of Roberta, unfettered, in a journalist’s thrall.

I managed a few tantalizing phone calls with John McCain’s outspoken mother, a column on my vain pursuit of an interview and a promise that the end of the presidential race would bring a chance for us to share some straight talk.

Roberta made good on her promise Monday, delivering a long-promised cup of tea, a tour of her history-laden Washington apartment and a rebuke of media blatherers who she feels put self above country.

As she led me into a sumptuous foyer -- red silk canopy overhead, Chinese landscape frescoed over the walls -- Mrs. McCain and I shared a laugh about how the campaign kept her under wraps.

“You see, they wouldn’t let me talk, thinking I don’t do the political thing,” she said. “And they were right.”

As a result, my column from last June said, the campaign had suffered a loss of candor and verve.

“Honey, I got so puffed up and conceited about that,” Mrs. McCain, 97, beamed. “All of it was flattery and lies. And I just ate it up.”

Though she “loved every second” of the presidential campaign, she felt the media favored Obama and that her son was saddled with responsibility for “the Bush economy.”

Mrs. McCain sees lots of partisan chatter in the media that she doesn’t like.

She feels obliged to “keep an eye” on liberals like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, but doesn’t have much stomach for what she hears.

“He comes on as if he is hysterical. He is so vicious,” Mrs. McCain told me. “You get as old as I am and you realize it’s the easiest thing in the world to be acerbic like that.”

Not that the conservatives are winning her heart either. “Some of them talk like such fools,” she said.

She saw a glimmer of clarity in late February, when Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele took a shot at Rush Limbaugh, calling him an “entertainer” whose radio show could be “incendiary” and “ugly.”

“It was the first smart thing I had heard anybody say about that . . . and the Republicans made him back down,” Mrs. McCain said. “Why? Tell me why. He should have stuck to his guns.”

She wouldn’t mind a little more intense scrutiny of President Obama, she told me. But she said there was no point in partisanship for its own sake.

“I am not going to say one word of criticism,” she said. “We are in the toughest times that I think we have had in history. And this country, I think, better get together.”

I told Mrs. McCain TV audiences didn’t tend to follow the voices of moderation. Radio, television and the Internet seemed to be more and more fractured along ideological lines. She agreed. (And she told me, for the umpteenth time, to stop calling her “Mrs. McCain.”)

“You know,” she said, “you don’t have to win everything to have a good life.”

I felt a little guilty about charging into a discussion of media and politics on what had initially been planned as a social visit.

She had already been too generous, serving the likes of me after the luminaries who had passed through this home over nearly four decades. My cup of tea came with delicate little sandwiches and sweets. Later, a can of Budweiser arrived, perched atop a silver tray.

Her apartment is on a leafy Washington thoroughfare, just a 10-minute walk from the White House. It’s crammed with art and artifacts from dozens of trips all over the world, many made as the wife of a Navy admiral, many with her intrepid identical twin, Rowena.

A picture of her meeting with Chiang Kai-shek fronts one bookshelf, close to a larger black-and-white of her father-in-law and other officers standing aboard the battleship Missouri for the signing of the Japanese surrender that ended World War II.

A rumpled snapshot of Britain’s Princess Fergie lies to one side. “She borrowed my place when I was out of town,” Roberta explained. “She had a big party.”

A nostalgia tour can be a little thick and sentimental. But Roberta hardly dwells on the past.

She has been to Europe twice since the election, once with family, once with her “lady lawyer” friend, and she plans on visiting Ireland in the fall, once the summer crowds die down. She’s speaking to a group of Republican women this weekend and can’t wait to attend her grandson Jack’s upcoming graduation from the Naval Academy, the fourth generation of the McCain family to pass through Annapolis.

Headed for the door, Roberta gave a quick pep talk for a free press. “We sure need it now,” she said.

She apologized for “clattering on too much” and invited me back any time.

“OK, honey,” she said, sending me out the door. “I loved having you.”

--

james.rainey@latimes.com

On the Media also appears Fridays on Page A2.