Cindy Mccain

Sen. John McCain unexpectedly released part of his wife's 2006 tax return on Friday, showing that she reported income of $6.1 million through a combination of salary, dividends, capital gains and payments from trusts. Cindy McCain, who controls one of the nation's largest beer wholesalers, has steadfastly refused to discuss her finances, saying she wants to protect her children's privacy. But late Friday, McCain's campaign office posted her two-page IRS Form 1040 on the Internet.

Every presidential campaign wants to turn its candidate into a likable human being, someone you'd like to hang out with as a pal. One way to do this is to plop the candidate on TV shows with Ellen and Oprah and Tyra and the chatty gals over at "The View." Another way to reveal the human side is to dispatch a spouse to the same venues, unless the spouse's name is Bill.

Not long after he became the presumed Republican nominee, John McCain flew to New Orleans to face a skeptical audience -- conservative leaders of the Council for National Policy. A questioner zeroed in on a topic McCain rarely addresses on the campaign trail, asking him to explain his faith in God. McCain, an Episcopalian who attends a Baptist church in Phoenix, turned to a well-worn tale of the guard he met when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

An icy wind whips by as Cindy McCain tramps across hillsides still slick from snow on the Albanian border, wearing well-worn hiking boots and carrying her Prada purse. She's looking out at minefields and visiting schools where children must thread their way around leftover munitions. One headmaster told her he had uncovered a cluster bomb when he went out to plant a tree.

All but written out of the presidential race last summer, John McCain crossed the finish line for the Republican nomination in first place Tuesday night, when he won the final batch of delegates he needed to clinch. As former Arkansas Gov.

On the night of the hard-fought Florida primary, John McCain spoke about weighty issues -- whether the Republican Party had lost its way and how he would fight America's enemies. His 23-year-old daughter, Meghan, broke down the night's atmospherics on her blog. "What does it feel like to win the Florida primary?" she mused. "It feels like the Doors song 'Break on Through.'

Sen. John McCain's wife was released from the hospital four days after she suffered what was described as a minor stroke. "I am happy to be going," Cindy McCain said as her husband, an Arizona Republican, pushed her wheelchair to their car. McCain, 49, suffered the stroke Monday, possibly because of a spike in her blood pressure, doctors said.

Sen. John McCain's wife was moved out of an intensive care unit, two days after she had a stroke, and was expected to be released from a Phoenix hospital in a few days. Cindy McCain, 49, suffered minor bleeding in her brain when a blood vessel ruptured Monday, possibly because of a spike in blood pressure, said Robert Spetzler, director of the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital.

They are two nice ladies from the Southwest, daughters of wealth and privilege, mothers who are panther-like in their protection of hearth and home. Both left teaching careers to concentrate full time on raising children. Both are grateful that the circumstances of their marriages to successful men permitted them to do so. Both are avid volunteers. Both are handsome women, with pastel eyes that might have wandered out of a Monet painting.