Entertainment

Meghan McCain's Got Something Big to Share

by Caroline Pate

Politician's kids: they're just like us. John McCain's daughter Meghan McCain loves Girls, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead. She wants to follow in her dad's footsteps and be a Republican, but she loves smoking weed and supports gay marriage.

Unlike us, though, McCain gets her own documentary/talk show. Called Raising McCain, the show will premiere on Pivot, a new channel aimed at millennials (barf). McCain describes the show as integrating politics and popular culture. She plans to cover topics like bullying, feminism, and sex and the death of romance. McCain said it was popular culture and MTV that inspired her passion for politics when she was young.

"When I was 14 years old, I met Tabitha Soren who worked for MTV News and she was the coolest chick I’d ever met. She was the first person I ever saw that looked like someone I’d want to hang out with who was talking about politics," McCain said.

"That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re 14 and your dad is running for president, you’re around suits all the time, and she was such a breath of fresh air."

McCain said she wants her show to exist somewhere between C-SPAN and Keeping up with the Kardashians. But when asked exactly what that means, McCain says she wants to see more people she can relate to on television.

"...I don’t see my face on TV," McCain said.

"Fuck, politics aside, I just mean a person I feel I could hang out with."

McCain often describes herself as existing in a sort of gray area, but that's not always a good thing. She's a "liberal republican," but what does that mean to her, exactly? Is she pro- or anti-choice? Is she a feminist? And having her new show exist in such broad terms doesn't do it much justice. It would be wonderful to have a show that addressed political issues in a way that people could relate to, especially young people. But it would be obnoxious to watch a show that just gave lip service to these issues in a trendy format to attract the 14-30 demographic.

We're sure to find out more about Meghan and the show once it premieres on September 14 — hopefully, it's more of the former and less of the latter. We need more people who exist in a "gray area" on television because there's a lot of those people who exist in real life. Meghan McCain wants to be a role model to those people, and if this show has a little more substance than MTV flash and millennial buzzwords, McCain can be a damn good one.

"I hope there are girls out there especially who’ll see that you don’t have to have it all figured out if you come from a conservative family or a liberal family you don’t have to agree with your parents," McCain said.

"It’s okay. You can be crazy and still be smart."