McCain launches 'biography' tour

During a weeklong tour to "reintroduce" himself to voters, the Arizona senator, who has already clinched the GOP presidential nomination, visited Meridian, Miss., where generations of McCains were raised and where a local air base is named for his grandfather and namesake John Sidney "Popeye" McCain, who was a flight instructor and admiral.

"As a boy, my family legacy, as fascinating as it was to me, often felt like an imposition," said the 71-year-old McCain.

"I knew from a very early age that I was destined for Annapolis and a career in the Navy," he said, referring to his eventual enrollment in the U.S. Naval Academy, and "often rebelled in small and petty ways to what I perceived as an encroachment on my free will."

McCain's tour, meant to capture voter attention while his two Democratic rivals are still battling it out for the nomination, may also soften conservative discomfort with the maverick senator, who has strayed from Republican orthodoxy on issues such as immigration and campaign reform.

McCain, who opposed the Bush administration's tax cuts because they were not linked to spending controls, said today that "government spending must not be squandered on things we do not need and can't afford." Arguing that schools were lagging, he said, "government can't just throw money at public education while reinforcing the failures of many of our schools but should, by choice and competition, be rewarding good teachers and holding bad teachers accountable."

On Tuesday, McCain will go to the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where he went to high school; on Wednesday, he will return to Annapolis, where he finished fifth from the bottom of his class at the academy. Later in the week the campaign will head to Florida, where McCain trained as a Navy pilot, and Arizona, where he got his start in politics. Meanwhile, the campaign has started running a new ad on its website touting his "service to America." McCain was shot down in Vietnam and held for more than five years as a prisoner of war.

As McCain campaigned in Mississippi, Obama picked up another superdelegate today when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota today endorsed him as the party's presidential nominee, dealing a blow to Clinton.