Hanoi Hilton to Paris Hilton

The Obama attacks may be damaging the John McCain "brand" in the long run, according to a growing chorus of Republican supporters and admirers, including McCain's mother who calls one of the ads "stupid."

But the candidate himself isn't backing off. On radio today, he compared an Obama speech to "watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall."

Long-time McCain watchers see ventriloquism in all this by Karl Rove protégés who have taken him over. McCain's 2000 campaign manager calls the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears commercial "clumsy, juvenile, and a mistake" while David Gergen parses the Charlton Heston ad calling Obama "The One" as "code for 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background."

In the long run, what will all this do to the image of a straight-talking war hero who withstood the pressures of being a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton and now is a captive of smearers using his name to compare Obama to Paris Hilton?

Perhaps a little time off will give McCain some perspective. “If I put in three or four 18-hour, 20-hour days in a row, then I’m not sharp," McCain told reporters recently. “It’s just a fact."

As Obama visits his grandmother and surfs in Hawaii, McCain is planning some down time later this month back home in Arizona. He may want to think about who he used to be and how to get back to being himself for the rest of the campaign season.