The John McCain campaign doesn’t really want his 96-year-old mother, Roberta, talking with the press, according to this James Rainey piece in the Los Angeles Times — a warm-and-fuzzy write-around that still intimates the generalized worry that old people are more likely to go off the reservation and say something crazy, or so wildly out of step with modern convention and language that it makes them seem unhinged or unkind. “They’ve got me muzzled,” says the (truly) elder McCain at one point, then adding with a chuckle: “Now, don’t you print that… I
really don’t like to be interviewed.” Later she tells Rainey, who relied on a preexisting relationship to circumvent the normal channels of interview arrangement, “Well, hon, they never said so, but I just don’t think they’re crazy about me talking to anybody.”