Meghan McCain's 'Dirty Sexy Politics': five best lines

Meghan McCain calls Sarah Palin a 'time bomb,' pokes fun at Mitt Romney, and details campaign misbehavior in her new book, 'Dirty Sexy Politics.'

Meghan McCain has been in trouble for oversharing before. Last October she posted a semi-revealing photo of herself on Twitter, to less than universal acclaim. She got mad at this response and threatened to quit tweeting. (She didn’t, in case you’re worried.)

But now John McCain’s outspoken daughter has published a book about her experiences during the presidential campaign, and not everyone is happy. She has kind of sort of taken out after Sarah Palin, for one thing. She writes that she called Palin the “Time Bomb.”

“I was waiting for her to explode,” writes Ms. McCain. “There was a fine line between genius and insanity, they say, and choosing her as the running mate was starting to seem like a definition of that line.”

Should we be surprised that McCain the Younger is not exactly mouthing the party line? We probably shouldn’t be – isn’t she the daughter of a maverick? Plus, one of her personal mottoes is “There are no secrets.”

That’s what she writes on page 31 of “Dirty Sexy Politics,” anyway.

"Because one way or another, all things are revealed. I believe that,” she writes.

In that spirit, here are a few of the book's other good bits:

Meghan McCain was obsessed with Mitt Romney. OK, so it was a “minor” obsession in her words, but in the weeks and months before her father locked up the nomination, Romney “was the politician whom I most loved to watch and ridicule.”

She liked making fun of his perfectly-coiffed stiffness, and the blinding whiteness of the Romney family’s teeth, apparently. Still, she thought he was the leading candidate for her dad’s running mate, prior to the actual choice being made. “There was a slight possibility it could be [Minnesota governor] Tim Pawlenty, who had a great head of hair,” McCain writes.

She cried the day Sarah Palin was picked. This was not because of Palin per se, however. McCain, who was traveling with her dad’s campaign as a blogger and general youth-outreach person, cried the morning of the VP announcement because no one would tell her who it was. This slight demonstrated her relative position in the campaign hierarchy, she felt.

“I am sensitive, way too sensitive for politics probably, and really emotional by nature,” McCain writes.

Her first impression of Sarah Palin was generally positive. She thought two things: Palin was beautiful, and she had a lot of kids.

Campaign hi-jinks. In Iowa before the primaries, the campaign stayed in a very crummy hotel – so crummy that there was a a half-eaten box of pizza left in the hall in front of Megan McCain’s room. Suspecting the person in the next room, Ms. McCain left out a plate of hard-boiled eggs for them to trod on, which they did.

The next day dad John McCain asked Megan how she’d liked the pizza he left for her.

Plus, in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, McCain stole a bunch of Mitt Romney yard signs and stuffed them in the trunk of her car. Fearing that she had been spotted, she rushed back to the local McCain campaign and talked her mom’s hairstylist, Piper Baker, into taking the rap.

That wasn’t necessary. The police never showed up.

Hairmageddon. The Palin family, including Levi Johnston, the soon-to-be-ex-fiancee of Bristol Palin, got more attention than Meghan McCain did, and McCain freely admits that she was not a good sport about this.

On the day of her dad’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn., McCain wandered into the campaign stylist and makeup room looking for help in controlling her hair. Everybody was helping do-over the Palin kids, and they had no time for her. She had to go back to her room and do her own hair.

“I was irrelevant. And in fact I might never have been relevant to begin with,” McCain writes.

The cops finally catch up to her. The day after election day, with her father’s dreams in ashes, Meghan McCain woke up late, rounded up some friends, and jumped in a Prius to drive to a McCain family cabin in Sedona, Ariz., to decompress.

She was doing 85 on the highway and got pulled over by the police. The officer asked her why she was speeding.

She said that she was sorry, but her father had just lost the presidential election to Barack Obama.

“This is possibly the best excuse I’ve ever had for speeding. He gave me a warning,” she writes.