Meghan McCain Goes Back to High School

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Like many high school rebels, Meghan McCain is prone to quoting the icons of like-so-don't-even-care-what-you-think teenage cool: Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, and Hunter S. Thompson. The only difference is that Meghan McCain is 27-years- old.

It appears that McCain has recently started on some sort of high school required reading list. Of late, the senator's daughter and MSNBC commentator has been tweeting quotes from On the Road and Nirvana songs. While many of us have gone through a phase where we felt brutally oppressed by The Man despite having a great deal of freedom and little to no responsibilities, this phase typically occurs when Mrs. Anderson is forcing us to write definitions after being late to Honors English five days in a row. But this is the state McCain is in. Like so many teens, McCain has long mistakenly believed that she is unique in being interested in sex, cuss words, music, and really deep thoughts about life. ("I was just told by a friend that my dating problems are 'because I have too much swagger for most men' but she was apparently," McCain tweeted at Toure on March 29, it seems in reference to Pam Grier.) But her love of adolescent literature is new.

She recently told Playboy's David Hochman that Hunter S. Thompson is one of her all-time favorite writers, because "I love the way he wrote with such disregard for authority and the status quo... But trust me, Hunter and I would have been fast friends." McCain's also begun tweeting quotes from the all-time greats of high school reading lists. For example:

"'I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.' -Jack Kerouac," she wrote March 27.
"'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything.' -Jack Kerouac," she tweeted April 3.
"'Candor ends paranoia.' - Allen Ginsberg," she tweeted January 12.
"'Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.' - Jean-Paul Sartre," she wrote January 20.

Then there are the music gods of misspent youth:

"'I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.' - Bob Dylan," she said February 6.
"'I would rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.' - Kurt Cobain," she wrote March 16.
"At the airport looking like a Woody Guthrie song," she said March 6.

And then there's the classic F-U to convention: Retweeting something called "NietzscheQuotes" on Valentine's Day. ("Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. #Nietzsche [sic.]").

Of course, it goes without saying that McCain's misspent youth is not being spent doing whip-its in the parking lot behind Walmart, a more modern form of teen rebellion, or wallowing in poverty in a cramped apartment or on a smelly road trip, like some of the writers she fetishizes. As she has tweeted herself, her "home away from home" is not the road, but the airport:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Elspeth Reeve is the former politics editor for The Wire.

Cecile Richards says the organization will not spin off its abortion services, even though Congress is threatening to remove the group’s funding.

The United States Congress is trying hard to defund Planned Parenthood, once and for all. For a period of one year, the proposed American Health Care Act would prohibit federal funds from going to non-profit organizations that provide family-planning services, including abortions, and get more than $350 million in reimbursements under Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor, the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities. When the Congressional Budget Office evaluated this clause of the bill, it “identified only one organization that would be affected: Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates and clinics.”

If this bill goes through, it would represent an existential threat for Planned Parenthood. The organization would be less able to serve poor women who are covered by state Medicaid programs, and it would likely have to close clinics or reduce its services because of the loss of funding. The main motivation behind this provision—and others like it that have come up at the state level—is opposition to abortion. This has lead some, including Ivanka Trump, to wonder why Planned Parenthood doesn’t just spin off its abortion services into a separate organization.