Fortunate Daughter

"The blog is trying to keep it real, and trying to show how it really is, and I look like crap!" she says. "Like, the last post I was a mess, and I was like, 'Well, there's pictures of me on the Internet looking like a mess.' But I kind of like the purity of it."

"Like, the three of us, we're around each other 24 hours a day, and it's like, you know, she feels very comfortable with us," says her fellow "blogette" Shannon Bae, whose black hair is streaked with blond and who is frequently seen grinning and leaping in photos posted on the blog. "I think that's what makes her really accessible. Because, you know, people can smell [expletive]."

"Totally," McCain says.

So, on to the revelations: She told MTV she thinks Barack Obama is "sexy." She has a teeny tiny tattoo of a star on her foot. ("I have always been drawn to people with tattoos," she writes on her blog.) She's been known to drink beer on primary nights when she's really stressed out. She adores the stylings of the corset-wearing burlesque stripper Dita Von Teese, and she told GQ she thinks the uber-trashy bisexual hook-up show "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila" is "hilarious!"

She went to Columbia University, where she studied art history, and interned at "Saturday Night Live" and Newsweek, where she wrote about stuff that wasn't terribly "serious." (" 'Snakes on a Plane' and makeup," she says.) Politics? Eh. She reads People on the campaign bus.

What's really meaningful to McCain is fashion. She dreams of being a designer, and she loved Chris March, the obese, effeminate contestant on Season 4 of "Project Runway," until he furnished several garments with . . .

"Human hair," she says with some disgust, and after that March was dead to her.

Today, Meghan McCain wears: a big sweater over a pair of leggings and a black cap tilted ever so slightly to the side. On her feet are an unusual pair of white Converse sneaker-boots that go all the way up her shins, purchased during a campaign layover in New Hampshire. While a sizable portion of the photographs McCain posts to her Web site involve her sleeping -- on buses, on planes and even on what appears to be a hotel concierge's desk -- she nevertheless always manages to look camera-ready.

She carries five pairs of shoes around with her and has, she says, "the biggest suitcase on the trail."

"He's nicknamed 'Mr. Lee,' " Bae says of that suitcase. "That's her Chinese manservant."

"I didn't create that," McCain says flatly. "And I don't like that nickname."

McCain and the other two "blogettes" spend a lot of time together: every day on the trail and sometimes nights, too, if they're sharing a hotel room. Bae, 32, a former cable producer, takes videos of Meghan McCain's adventures for the Web site (which she edits and often sets to dance music) and Brand, 30, a professional photographer and old friend of McCain's, takes pictures.