Friends of Liberty: Is McCain Overplaying the POW Card?

By MICHAEL SCHERER / DENVERTIME MAGAZINE
Thursday, AUGUST 28, 2008


When he first ran for Congress in Arizona nearly three decades ago,John McCain had one clear liability: he wasn't from the state, and he could count the number of years he had lived there on a couple of fingers.So his primary opponent, state senator Jim Mack, attacked him as a Johnny-come-lately. To counter the charge, at a candidate forum, McCain offered a decidedly pointed response. "I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things," he said. "As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."
McCain's heroic biography, as a Navy veteran and former prisoner of war, gave him a clear out for the carpetbagger critique. It was widely seen as a devastating response — and a key turning point in McCain's early political career.
Twenty-six years later, McCain has returned to the same tactic, but some critics say he is overplaying his trump card. At several points over the past two weeks, the McCain campaign has raised his military service in efforts to defuse political attacks, even when it seemed to have little if any bearing on the issue at hand. When the Obama campaign laid into McCain for not knowing the number of houses owned by his family, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told the WashingtonPost that "this is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison," a refrain McCain himself repeated more recently during an appearance on The Tonight Show. When an Obama staffer suggested, without evidence, that McCain might have left the "cone of silence" before a forum at Rick Warren's Saddle Creek Church, McCain spokeswoman Nicole Wallace said, "The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous." And in a speech this week questioning Obama's foreign policy judgment and interpretation of the end of the Cold War, McCain himself mentioned, "Now I missed a few years of the Cold War, as the guest of one of our adversaries."...