POLITICS: Meghan McCain: No DADT Talk on Turkey Day

Meghan McCain will head home for the holidays—but at the Thanksgiving table, "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell" will be a taboo subject. Perhaps a good idea, since she’s a gay-rights advocate, her father is fighting against the repeal of DADT, and her mother seems to have flip-flopped on the issue. “I have to separate the political and the personal,” Meghan says in a Christian Science Monitor profile.

The younger McCain is currently touring to promote her book, Dirty Sexy Politics, and she’s pushing a hipper Republican image. That was tough to do on her father’s 2008 campaign trail, when “my job was to stand still and look pretty.” Still, she says, she was “bratty” to the Secret Service before getting an image makeover: cutting her hair, dressing more conservatively, but still swearing a lot. Looking toward 2012, she’s backing Mitt Romney—if he runs.