Cindy McCain's Prenup With Us

Democrats clamoring for the Republican candidate's wife to release her tax returns are setting themselves up to look petty and peevish in an election that should be about Iraq, the US economy and our place in the world.

Voters know that Cindy McCain is a very rich woman who has inherited an estimated $100 million. Is hounding her for more detail any more admirable than the clamor in 2004 for Theresa Heinz Kerry to show us the money?

When they married, the McCains apparently signed a prenuptial agreement to keep their money separate, as many couples do in second marriages. Do we need to be more involved in her finances than her husband is?

Yes, yes, he traveled in her corporate jet during the campaign, and we should be sure that he did it as legally as any candidate uses such advantages.

But otherwise, it's hard to see how Mrs. McCain's money is any of the public's business. That she uses some of it for humanitarian purposes reflects well on her, but that too doesn't have much bearing on whether her husband is qualified to be president.

The McCains' Monied Modesty

We know many millions Hillary and Bill Clinton made (109 in eight years), but the family finances of John and Cindy McCain are none of our business, thank you very much.

In releasing the Senator's tax returns today, his campaign tells us: "Since the beginning of their marriage, Senator McCain and Mrs. McCain have always maintained separate finances. As required by federal law and Senate rules, Mrs. McCain has released significant and extensive financial information through Senate and Presidential disclosure forms. In the interest of protecting the privacy of her children, Mrs. McCain will not be releasing her personal tax returns."

So we are allowed to know that, for 2007, Senator McCain paid $84,460 in federal income taxes on taxable income of $258,800.

It's comforting to know that the McCain children's privacy is being protected. Chelsea Clinton is a grownup, and the Obama children don't stand to inherit all that much, unless their father loses this year and writes more best-sellers and goes on a lecture tour, so their financial privacy is not of such urgent concern.

The Clintons' Taxing Schedule

Less than a year after he left the White House in 1953, Harry Truman gave a speech to the City College of New York alumni in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. I was editing their magazine at the time, and if the former president's "honorarium" had exceeded $1000 and expenses, the check would have bounced.

The memory comes back at the news in the Clinton tax returns that on one day in 2005 the former president made $475,000 for two speeches in Canada, more than double his annual salary in the White House, as part of a schedule of 352 speaking engagements that year.

The Clintons' total income of $109 million in the past eight years is a testament, pace the Obama bashers, to the value of words--from daises, in the pages of books and around corporate tables. It may be a measure of their embarrassment that the returns were released in a Friday night news dump to get as little attention as possible.

Cynics may see all this as selling out to 21st century celebrity, but we are a long way from the days after the Civil War when Gen. Robert E. Lee indignantly refused offers to write his memoirs. "I should be trading on the blood of my men," he said.

That evening in 1953, Harry Truman gave a rousing speech about the dangers of McCarthyism to academic freedom. It was worth every penny.