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.

The McCain Makeover

The Righteous Republican cosmeticians have started to work their magic and, as in the women's magazines I used to edit, a natural-looking person may end up resembling an aging tart. To borrow from Gloria Steinem, McCain would do better to brush them off and say, "This is what seventy and self-possessed looks like, get used to it."

The first ad is a tipoff, harking back to those days at the Hanoi Hilton over a quarter of a century ago, echoing his advice to fellow prisoners: "Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield. Stand up. We're Americans. And we'll never surrender."

We're all prisoners of George W. Bush in Iraq now, and it may not be in McCain's best interests to remind us that he wants to keep us there, if not for a hundred years, until some of the troops there are his age now.

Today William Kristol is advising the candidate who admits he doesn't know much about the economy to offer "a broad reform agenda--education reform, health insurance reform, tax reform, government reform, Wall Street reform. He could start by outlining an up-to-date, capitalism-friendly and transparency-requiring approach to regulating the credit markets."

Biography isn't enough, Kristol reminds McCain. You have to start doing a George Bush impersonation, throwing out all kinds of voter bait that you can sweep aside when you get into the White House.

By the time Conservatives finish remaking McCain, his nonagenarian mother won't recognize him and, if he looks in the mirror, neither will he.

The McCain Mutiny

With mass departures today from his campaign staff, it may be time to write John McCain’s political obituary. The captain of the Straight Talk Express deserves to go out on his shield like the honorable warrior he has always been.

In an eerie parallel to Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” the Senator from Arizona morphed from a lifelong by-the-book career serviceman to the unhinged Capt. Queeg of the popular 1950’s novel, play and movie.

In the anger over his support for an insane war, it would be an injustice if McCain’s service to his country were swept out with the Iraq wreckage. Unlike Bush, Cheney and, yes, Bill Clinton, he served and suffered through Vietnam, another unjust war not of his making.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, an Admiral, was stationed, John Sidney McCain III went to Annapolis, was wounded in Vietnam, and captured and tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner, most of it in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

As a Senator, he has advocated gun control, campaign finance reform and a humane approach to immigration legislation.

McCain might have been a quirky President, but unlike Bush, an honorable one if he hadn’t been derailed by the Rove smear machine in 2000 and his own mistakes for 2008.

But the Republican field of candidates he leaves behind provides the best possible contrast to his integrity.

Ave et vale, Senator.