Is it Pandering If She's Only A Trophy Wife?

Indeed, McCain felt so comfortable at the event that he even volunteered his wife for the rally’s traditional beauty pageant, an infamously debauched event that’s been known to feature topless women.

“I encouraged Cindy to compete,” McCain said to cheers. “I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

— As quoted by CNN

Offering up your wife's services to sweeten some deal is a perogative of naked patriarchy that is perhaps less common in the modern age than in the past.

The gesture resurfaced at the annual Harley get together in Sturges, South Dakota, where McCain had gone to plump up his mojo. In a field of however many motorcyclists, the guy who flew jets in war holds the trump card. However chancey the lives of motorcyclists, however "outlaw," those lives can't match the life of a guy who bombed people from a jet in war and even crashed a few times, too. Even the toughest Harley types whose legitimacy derives from having done a respectable amount of time have nothing on John McCain.

I think Hunter Thompson described the practice of sharing out the women among Hells Angels in his book. No one at Sturgis is unaware of the tradition. All the show us your boobs/Miss Buffalo Chip stuff functions as a ritualization of that paleopatriarchical practice which McCain nicely recalls with his remark.