Opinion: McCain’s coming back

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Nearly four decades ago John McCain and his fellow American POWs imprisoned in North Vietnam would climb onto each other’s shoulders to peer out their cell grate and signal each other by hand. Today, the 71-year-old McCain is running in an uphill campaign for the Republican nomination for president, and he’s counting on his war buddies and hundreds like them to help him.

This weekend the Arizona senator is completing another leg of his ‘No Surrender Tour,’ this part in South Carolina. The tour title has a double meaning, no surrender to the rough days of overspending and staff turmoil that sent his poll numbers plummeting and no surrender in the Iraq war, which McCain says is the ‘seminal’ national issue and must take precedence over his political ambitions.

We’ve written about McCain’s scrappy campaigning alone in the back of a commercial plane last month. And you can see him Sunday morning on ‘Meet the Press.’ Now, in a compelling update from the campaign trail by The Times’ James Rainey, we learn how McCain the unrelenting underdog is doing and why his poll numbers are now showing a resurgence, despite or perhaps because of his adamant straight-talking defense of the unpopular war and its importance to U.S. national security.

‘It won’t be easy,’ says the senator, now back in his comfortable role as political maverick and straight-shooting politician, ‘but it’s not supposed to be easy. This is the most important job in the world.’

McCain gets a close hearing from his audiences. And he tells it like it is. ‘This conflict was badly mismanaged,’ says McCain, an early critic of the early strategy, ‘and Americans are frustrated and angry and saddened by the tremendous sacrifices that have been made. But we do have a new strategy and a new general and it’s succeeding. And we ought to give it a chance to succeed.’

At every stop, McCain denounces the MoveOn.org ad calling the U.S. commander in Iraq ‘Gen. Betray Us,’ and he dismisses talk of his being a hero, saying dismissively that he simply got in the way of an anti-aircraft missile. Of course, he also suffered multiple injuries that plague him to this day and spent nearly six years in a prison camp, turning down one opportunity to leave because others had been there longer.

Now in a long political struggle, McCain vows that he can ‘out-campaign’ anyone, and Rainey’s account tells us how. The complete story is available here on this website now and in Sunday’s print editions.

--Andrew Malcolm