by Mark Silva
In the end, a campaign is a family affair.
If the pursuit of the highest office in the land will not inexorably alter the family life of the candidate who wins it, the campaign will certainly consume it.
John McCain, senior senator from Arizona, has had the company and moral support of his wife Cindy on the campaign trail. She even performed a good-humored Vanna White-like cameo role on Saturday Night Live for the Republican nominee over the weekend, displaying his mock QVC line of McCain "Fine Gold."
Since the couple were married in 1980 - his second marriage - the former Cindy Hensley has supported the political career of the former Navy flier and prisoner of war in every way possible: Helping him finance his first campaign for Congress in 1982, helping him get a house in the district where he wanted to run and then raising their children in Phoenix while the congressman and then senator plugged away for nearly 26 years.
She was the 24-year-old daughter of a wealthy beer distributor when they met. He was 18 years her senior, a Navy captain. Both lied about their ages at their meeting in Hawaii. They have had three children together and adopted a fourth. All but the youngest sons and daughters of McCain's seven total, the adopted Bridget, a teenager, are adults now. For the McCain's the White House would largely be an adult affair.
Barack and Michelle Obama, on the other hand, are the parents of two young girls. He has often campaigned without the company of his family.
Not since John Kennedy occupied the White House has the nation focused on a first family that included two picture-perfect young children. Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois, has largely shielded his children from the glare of the campaign - cringing when interviewers elicited regretted personal information for a celebrity TV show, and turning guard-dog protective when press photographers got too close to last week's father-daughter Trick-or-Treating.
But in the White House, the Obamas would inevitably present a family tableau unseen for many years, an irresistible source of scrutiny for a nation already hosting a historic inheritor of the Oval Office, the first African-American president in a nation once riven by slavery and only lately providing legal protection for the voting rights of minorities.
For the Obama's, the White House would largely be a family affair, a family that they would be sharing, as much as they attempted to shield it, with a nation.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), wife Michelle and children Malia and Sasha arriving in Cleveland for a rally with balladeer Bruce Springsteen on Sunday. (Chicago Tribune photo by Zbigniew Bzdak)