Obama's misleading house ad--McCain owns none

NY Times:

When Senator John McCain is in Washington, he lives in a luxury high-rise condominium in Arlington, Va., owned by his wife, Cindy Hensley McCain. Mrs. McCain also owns their condos in Phoenix, San Diego and Coronado, Calif., and their vacation compound near Sedona, Ariz. And it is the beer business, Hensley & Company, she inherited from her father that is the source of the McCain family fortune.

That fortune makes Mr. McCain one of the richest members of the Senate. Yet barely a sliver of it is in his name.

Democrats have increasingly highlighted Mr. McCain’s wealth. Senator Barack Obama ridiculed him on Thursday for being unable to say how many homes he owned, saying it showed that Mr. McCain was out of touch with ordinary Americans. But with the McCains’ money in Cindy McCain’s name, as dictated by a prenuptial agreement, the senator’s finances are more difficult to assess and scrutinize than those of many other political candidates.

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Hensley & Company has grown from a tiny operation in the 1950s to the dominant beer wholesaler in Arizona and the third-largest Budweiser distributor in the country, with more than $300 million in annual sales. It plays a leading role in corporate Phoenix — Andy McCain, the senator’s stepson from his first marriage and a top executive of the beer company, is now president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce — and is a forceful presence in state politics on the issues that matter to it.

But by all accounts, Mrs. McCain is far from a forceful presence at the company, where she is chairwoman.

She crisscrosses the country on the company jet, keeps an accountant on the company payroll to mind her personal finances, drives a company Lexus with “MS BUD” plates and says she oversees the company’s “strategic planning and corporate vision.” Yet she almost never shows up in the office, is deemed an absentee owner by Anheuser-Busch and has left scarcely a mark on the company, present and former executives say.

Mrs. McCain has spent far more time as a volunteer on behalf of needy children. She is a board member of CARE and Operation Smile, which provides cleft-palate surgery for impoverished children; when she visited Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh 17 years ago, she brought a baby girl back for the surgery and then adopted her.

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Mrs. McCain owns 10 homes, including rental properties.

There are the condominium in the Crystal City section of Arlington; two in an oceanfront tower in Coronado; her father’s condo in the La Jolla section of San Diego; a $4.7 million condo atop one of Phoenix’s newest luxury towers; another unit on its fourth floor; and a $700,000 townhouse nearby.

Then there are Mrs. McCain’s vacation homes outside Sedona. In 1985, a Hensley entity bought the first, along Oak Creek. In 1996, Mrs. McCain bought an adjacent home for $750,000.

In 1992, the McCains and the Harpers formed a partnership to buy six acres of vacant land across the creek, and in 2000 they bought another neighbor’s spread. The Audubon Society turned the vacant land into a private bird sanctuary with help from the McCains.

While all of the family’s real estate is held by Mrs. McCain, the John and Cindy McCain Family Foundation is funded by Mr. McCain. From 2001 to 2006, its donations averaged about $260,000 a year. In addition to big donations to children’s causes, mine clearing and Parkinson’s research, the United States Naval Academy received $420,000 to run an ethics conference in the senator’s name; the Brophy school has received more than $250,000; Christ Lutheran, which Bridget and Jim attended, more than $100,000.

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With his prenuptial agreement it is understandable why John McCain would not be intimately familiar with his wife's holdings. It would be unseemly to take that much of an interest unless those holdings were causing her some distress.

There is much more in the story which appears to be a solid job of reporting. It explains why the NY Times did not jump on the buzz created by the Obama campaign about a perceived gaffe. Like many such events a Democrat candidate frames the point and many in the media react like Pavlov's dogs. It is to the Times credit that they were already doing a story on the subject and knew the facts to be different.

I think this story pretty well takes the wind out of the Obama argument, but I doubt it will stop him from making the argument. He does not easily admit his mistakes. He was still arguing that he was right to oppose the surge even after it was clear to the rest of the world that he was wrong.