A pro-Obama Christian group questioned McCain’s virtue by bringing up the fact that he ditched his first wife after a debilitating car accident. The McCain camp, naturally, got huffy:
“These smears on John McCain’s character and faith expose the utter hypocrisy of Barack Obama’s claim to represent a new kind of politics. It’s disgraceful.” He went on to say that Americans “know that John McCain’s faith and character were tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”
The response made One Drop roll his eyes:
First of all, we have the obvious hypocrisy of the McCain camp trying to hold Obama responsible for something said by members of a PAC that has no affiliation with his campaign, after denying that their own campaign has any responsibility for what independent groups say about Obama. But that’s nothing new for Republicans.
What I find interesting about McCain’s response is that the list of personal attributes that arise out of McCain’s time as a POW keeps growing. We’ve been hearing the argument that having been a POW gives McCain foreign policy savvy for a while. Now, in addition to gaining expertise in international relations, McCain apparently also gained irrefutable proof that he is a man of faith. There can’t be any criticism of McCain’s publicly-known philandering, and abandonment of his badly injured first wife in favor of a young, blonde heiress, because McCain was a POW. Of course he has faith, he was a POW.
Having been a POW is not some all-encompassing shield of virtue, able to deflect any and all criticisms or block accountability for every action that McCain has taken since being released. Had McCain returned to the U.S. and started robbing banks, his status as a former POW wouldn’t stop him from going to jail. That’s obviously an extreme example, but the same principle applies to smaller indiscretions. If it matters whether politicians are faithful to their wives, it matters whether or not those politicians are former POWs. If the way McCain treated his first wife, specifically the timing and circumstances of their divorce, is a valid subject for voters to consider, it remains valid regardless of McCain’s wartime experiences.
The McCain camp, though, is gonna ride the POW train ’til the wheels fall off. At that forum at Saddleback on Saturday*, Rick Warren interviewed Obama for an hour, and then McCain. He asked both of them the same questions, but McCain was supposed to be tucked in some “cone of silence” where he couldn’t hear any of the questions or Obama’s answers. (As it turns out, McCain was actually in a motorcade on the way to the church.) When some folks thought McCain’s responses were a little too clever, the McCain camp, again, got all huffy:
“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.
*I haven’t had a chance to peep the forum yet. If you did, what did you think?
