CAMPAIGN '08 - No support surge for McCain - He points with pride to the Iraq troop increase. Voters aren't swayed.

More than any other candidate for president, McCain has tied his fortunes to support for sending more U.S. troops into the unpopular war. Now that violence in Iraq has waned after a troop buildup, McCain wants some credit.

And so the Republican senator from Arizona, once a prisoner of war in Vietnam, came this week to South Carolina, an early-voting state that is home to many veterans, and proclaimed he was right all along.

"I knew what needed to be done, and now we're doing it," he told uniformed veterans and others packed into Hudson's Smokehouse in Lexington for a barbecue dinner.

Just back from a Thanksgiving weekend visit to Iraq, McCain told stories of restaurants newly opened, soccer games, a decline in bombings, fewer bodies found dumped overnight, and "a dramatic shift in the attitude of the Iraqi people."

"We are winning in Iraq, and that's a fact," he said.

Yet it is far from clear that GOP voters are ready to reward McCain. He might have been right about the need for a troop buildup, said Karin Hollack, a Republican college student from Des Moines. But, she said, that does not make him any less "off-putting."

"I don't really like him," said Hollack, 27.

McCain is the only major Republican candidate to make the Iraq war his campaign centerpiece. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee typically mention it only in passing or in response to questions.

McCain, however, spoke of little else as he campaigned Monday and Tuesday in Lexington, Seneca and Anderson.

"I'm grateful that we Republicans have stood fast," he told the crowd at Hudson's Smokehouse. "I'm grateful that this president has stood fast."

In his newest television ad, McCain looks into the camera and boasts of condemning former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for deploying what the senator long saw as too few troops in Iraq.

"I made the Pentagon angry when I criticized Rumsfeld's Iraq strategy, and I upset the media when I supported the strategy that's now succeeding," McCain says in the ad, which plays up his rebel persona.

He picked up the same theme in Lexington. "No one else who will appear before you who's running for president said a word," McCain told the crowd.