It's his trump card. His ace in the hole. His cynical analog of the proverbial "race card pulled from the bottom of the deck." It's the reason you should be ashamed of yourself for asking him that hard-hitting question. It's a cheap play for sympathy that has defined his career for three decades. It's John McCain's political raison d'etre:
He was a POW for five and a half years. That's five and a half years without a kitchen table. Or eight houses. Five and a half harrowing years that you'd have to live through to understand.
So why can't John McCain close the deal with fellow POWs? The drip, drip, drip of fellow POWs who object to McCain's candidacy is becoming a flood. From today's Roanoke Times:
The admiration that former prisoners of war who live in Western Virginia have for Sen. John McCain runs deep. But their esteem does not translate into unconditional support for his presidential candidacy.
"I certainly do not believe that being a POW qualifies anyone to be president," said Robert Gray, who spent 34 months in a North Korean prison camp and is now commander of the Roanoke Valley chapter of the American Ex-Prisoners of War.
"I have to honor him," Gray said of McCain, who was held for more than five years by the North Vietnamese after they shot down his Navy jet fighter in 1967. "But my honoring him doesn't mean I have to vote for him for president."
It looks like McCain receives very limited mileage from whoring his former POW status. One fellow POW even qualifies Barack Obama's repeated assertion that he honors McCain's service to America:
"Unfortunately the McCain camp feels that this is an all-purpose reason to vote for him," said Charles Ayling, a Vietnam-era prisoner of war who was held for 11 months in North Korea. He was a crewman aboard the Navy intelligence ship Pueblo, an unarmed vessel captured by the Korean communists off their coast in January 1968. The Pueblo's 83 men were held for nearly a year.
"I believe that on behalf of this nation, John McCain went through incarceration and torture," Ayling said. "Barack Obama has said he honors McCain's service to the country. I would agree with that, but I don't feel that [McCain's] POW experience qualifies him to be president."
And, further eroding McCain's heroic veneer, the article even brings up General Clark's astute remarks:
The notion that McCain's POW ordeal strengthens him to meet the challenges of the Oval Office has been panned by the likes of retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, once an unsuccessful presidential candidate himself.
"He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war," Clark said on CBS' "Face the Nation" in July. But Clark said McCain lacks "executive responsibility."
His fellow POWs have even aligned themselves with the conventional wisdom regarding his culpability in the current economic crisis. They agree that, although McCain was indeed a POW, he's pimped economic policies the past 26 years have royally f!@# up our economy:
Ayling further faults McCain's ties to a Republican administration that he views as lax in its oversight of Wall Street and big business.
"The whole thrust of these last eight years has been to set business free from regulation. I think you can see the result of the greed and recklessness," he said, referring to this month's turmoil in the equity market and the multibillion-dollar bailout of American International Group, among other financial rescues.