CAMPAIGN '08: ON THE TRAIL - He's rallying the veterans for his fight - McCain tries to make a comeback in the GOP field, flanked by friends from his POW days in North Vietnam.
NASHUA, N.H. — Locked in the North Vietnamese prison camp they called the Hanoi Hilton, John McCain and fellow prisoners craved any scrap of information that might stoke their morale and help them persevere.
The compact Navy pilot would climb on the shoulders of a big Marine flier named Orson Swindle to reach the high grate where he would trade hand signals with other imprisoned Americans.
"Anything we could get, any tidbit, helped us keep going," McCain said as he rode on a campaign bus through Iowa.
Nearly four decades later and half a world away, McCain is again hoping to rise on the shoulders of his fellow veterans. At 10 stops in Iowa and New Hampshire last week, McCain, Swindle and other comrades who once shared Vietnamese prison cells basked in the warm affection of fellow veterans. They rallied support for the war in Iraq, occasionally relived their daunting captivity and pushed hard to jump-start McCain's now underdog bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
As he prepared to complete the tour over the next two days in South Carolina, the Arizona senator insisted that his political aspirations took a back seat to the "seminal" issue of the moment: whether America would stay the course in Iraq.
Yet the double meaning in the name of his No Surrender Tour could hardly be ignored, as the onetime Republican front-runner said he still would overcome the poor fundraising, staff defections and lackluster poll results that earlier this year appeared to derail his candidacy.
"I can out-campaign anyone," McCain told reporters as his green No Surrender Tour bus rolled past cornfields outside Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Wednesday. "It won't be easy. But it's not supposed to be easy. This is the most important job in the world."
McCain's hopes were buoyed by strong reviews of his performance in the Sept. 5 Republican debate in New Hampshire (one focus group and several commentators declared him the winner) and by newspaper accounts of a resurgence. The Manchester Union Leader said in an editorial that "the spirited, commanding character New Hampshire fell in love with eight years ago" had reappeared.
A couple of recent national polls measured some improvement for McCain, but he remains third or even fourth in a Republican field that he had been expected to lead.
