McCain’s admission

ACCORDING to its marketing literature, The Residences at 2211 Camelback, an upmarket apartment building in Phoenix, Arizona, is “a dream within a dream environment,” where “life beyond the expected awaits your discovery”.

An “ambience of distinction embraces residents and their guests upon arrival and rewards them with soaring architecture [and] a bountiful treasure of luxury amenities that ensure personal comfort”. There’s a fitness centre, business facilities and a boardroom, a massage service, and a rooftop pool terrace with a sun deck and spa, offering “majestic mountain views,” all just yards away from “couture boutique shopping, exquisite dining [and] championship golf”.

If John McCain does not win the US presidency this November, his two combined units at 2211 Camelback might provide a consoling setting in which to reflect upon why. So might his ranch on the banks of a creek in Sedona, a couple of hours’ drive away, which has three houses on it, or his three-bedroom apartment in Virginia. Or one of a number of other hideaways — the exact number, of course, being precisely McCain’s biggest problem at the moment.

Whether or not it ends up proving decisive in the outcome of the election, McCain’s admission in an interview this week that he does not know how many homes he owns — “I’ll have my staff get to you,” he promised a reporter for the Washington-based website Politico — certainly had many of the qualities of the perfect political gaffe. Like the first president Bush acting stunned by a supermarket checkout scanner, or John Kerry going windsurfing, it threatened to demolish McCain’s man-of-the-people credentials — an especially awkward matter in a campaign in which charges of elitism have been flung about so energetically, and in which winning the votes of struggling lower-middleclass Americans in key swing states is seen as crucial to victory. (It didn’t help that McCain, days earlier, had suggested that only those with an income of GBP3m or more really counted as “rich”.)

Helpfully for Barack Obama, it also raised another theme, one that the Democratic candidate’s campaign team felt unable to broach in the attack advertisement they launched within hours: the idea that McCain, who will soon turn 72, is growing so forgetful that he can’t recall basic facts about himself.

To be fair, the truth about McCain’s homes, which are mainly owned by his heiress wife, Cindy, or by companies she controls, is complex. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, who arrived at the White House having never owned any home at all, it depends on what the meaning of the word “home” is. Do the knocked-together units at 2211 Camelback, worth about $1.7m, count as one or two?

Cindy McCain certainly owns a $1m condominium unit in La Jolla, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but it’s reportedly occupied by an elderly aunt. A loft-style apartment in Phoenix features “a giant silver chimney” extending from the fireplace to ceiling “about 20ft above,” one reporter noted — but it was bought for McCain’s daughter Meghan. “The reality is they have some investment properties and stuff,” McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post. “It’s not as if he lives in 10 houses. That’s just not the case. The reality is they have four that actually could be considered houses they could use.”

The McCain properties, worth an estimated $13m in total, demonstrate a striking homogeneity in their architecture and locations. Counting 2211 Camelback as a single residence, three of them are in Phoenix, or not too far away. Five are apartments in modern tower blocks, and three overlook the Pacific Ocean. Two are in Coronado, near San Diego in California. (Last year, Cindy McCain told San Diego Magazine she comes to the area “any time I get a chance to”.)

The most distinctive is probably the McCain ranch in Sedona, where McCain played host to several potential vice-presidential candidates earlier in the campaign, though the description of it as a “ranch” sometimes irritates his opponents. “McCain doesn’t graze cattle or sheep,” the liberal Arizona blogger David Safier wrote recently. “He doesn’t sell meat or wool. He has about 15 acres of land in Oak Creek near Sedona with a large vacation home ... and about six smaller guest houses... ‘Ranch’ evokes images of cowboys and horses and cattle roundups ... it makes McCain and [President George] Bush seem like virile, independent men of the land.”

In fact, Bush only purchased Prairie Chapel Ranch — his beloved “Western White House” in Crawford, Texas, where he entertains world leaders and relaxes by clearing brush — in 1999.

Nevertheless, accusations of housing-related elitism tend to work more effectively in US politics when levelled against Democrats: rightwing wealth, it’s implied, is the result of vigorous capitalist success, whereas liberal wealth is hypocritical, suggestive of out-of-touch elitism and feyness — and so it remains to be seen whether McCain’s remarks will hurt him to the degree that Kerry was damaged by attacks on his family’s home ownership in 2004.

In purely factual terms, the two cases are remarkably similar: Kerry, as Republicans took much delight in noting, had the use of at least five homes, again mostly owned by his heiress wife. One of them, notoriously, was a 1485 barn that had been shipped over piece-by-piece from England to Idaho — although not by Kerry but by his wife’s former husband, John Heinz III, a Republican.

Obama certainly does not live in penury, something upon which the McCain campaign was quick to try to capitalise in the wake of their candidate’s gaffe. Obama owns a large redbrick home in Kenwood, a neighbourhood of Chicago, which may or may not be “a frickin’ mansion” — as Rogers described it — but which does have four fireplaces and a wine cellar.

And purchasing it did involve Obama in dealings with the disgraced Chicago businessman Tony Rezko, a donor to his campaign, though the candidate has insisted that he paid well above market price and received no favours. (A McCain ad released on Thursday referred to the Rezko connection as Obama’s own “housing problem”.) Obama also rents a second-floor apartment in a townhouse in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Washington DC.

As so often in this election season, though, the McCain campaign response ended up sounding peevish, like a playground taunt hurriedly constructed in an attempt to turn Obama’s own words against him. “Does a guy who made more than $4m last year, just got back from a vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?” Rogers asked. McCain “is a guy who lived in one house for five and half years — in prison in Vietnam”.

Rezko was not a convicted felon at the time, of course (and, incidentally, there are no private beaches in Hawaii). On the other hand, some of the McCain family’s homes may have been smart investment decisions, and their total number really is a question of definition. But it’s perception that matters — and the appalling impression made by McCain left his campaign, last night, in the curious position of looking forward to the wall-to-wall media coverage that Obama’s vice-presidential announcement was bound to generate: at least it promised to change the subject.

— The Guardian, London