Today’s Must Read

“McCain camp goes on offense in S.C.” headlines the Los Angeles Times. “McCain Takes the Fight To Negative Opponents” echoes the Washington Post.

The campaign is doing its best to show that it won’t let 2000 happen again, when still unknown dirty tricksters called South Carolina voters to ask them whether they knew that McCain had illegitimately fathered a black baby. But so far, the campaign’s response to the attacks has been far more notable than the attacks themselves.

As we’ve been amply documenting here, McCain has indeed been the target of push polls this time around, but so have his opponents Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson — with the notable exception of Mike Huckabee. The calls, numbering around seven million so far in various primary states, are the work of the Huck-supporting group Common Sense Issues, and the attacks are pretty standard GOP negative fare so far.

And then there’s Vietnam Veterans against John McCain. Recently, the group sent a mailer to approximately 80 newspaper editors in South Carolina accusing McCain of selling out his fellow POWs in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the McCain campaign (which is working hard to appeal to vet voters) made one of McCain’s former fellow POWs available to the media to respond to the smear. The story, picked up by the AP and Wall Street Journal among others, got national play — undoubtedly more play than the group would have been able to get on its own.

I spoke to the founder of Vietnam Veterans against John McCain, Jerry Kiley, yesterday. He told me that the group hasn’t “actively sought donations at this point,” and that the next step for the group will be mailings “going out to our network,” with the intention that the mailing would then be forwarded on to local media there. The group just doesn’t have the funds to send mailings directly to voters — nor, as they declared they would in their statement of purpose, to run radio and TV ads. Things “could change,” he told me, “if we received a sizable donation,” but he wasn’t holding out much hope.

Instead, they’re planning “an email campaign.” Groups of like-minded vets throughout the country will get the email chain started, he said, “so it will spread very quickly throughout the country.”

So they’re not exactly the second coming of the well-funded Swift Boat Vets (one of whom said he was “appalled” by their attack on McCain). They don’t have $22 million to spend. But they are certainly admirers — even making an homage in their South Carolina mailing. As we pointed out yesterday, the mailing had a label with the Swift Boat Vets’ icon on it. But we couldn’t figure out if it said Swift Boat Vets for Truth or Swift Boot Vets for Truth:

The winner, Kiley, told me, is Swift Boot Vets. “We actually named ourselves the Swift Boot Vets because we want to boot McCain out of the primary.”

Update: Here’s video of McCain responding to the mailers on Fox News: