My favorite part of the 2008 presidential campaign is watching normally sentient reporters tell me how John McCain is either reticent about talking about his POW experience, or ambivalent, or reluctant, or one of about a hundred other adjectives meant to tell me he doesn’t talk about it very much and doesn’t like doing so.
Five years as a POW involved a kind of suffering and terror I think very few of us can even comprehend. McCain has every right to talk about it constantly. But let’s get real. He does talk about it constantly.
Where to start? Probably half of John McCain’s ads contain photographs of either his time as a POW or his home-coming from Vietnam POW captivity. (That says quite a lot.) Those that don’t refer to it explicitly refer to it implicitly by referencing sacrifice, heroism, etc. He and his campaign frequently talk about his days as a POW. The candidate frequently makes pseudo-self-deprecating jokes in campaign appearances about his time as a POW.
Beside his 2000 presidential run, it’s been a very long time since McCain was in a competitive election race. And it’s not too much to say that McCain’s POW status — both in explicit telling and in implicit references — is the dominant theme of his entire campaign.
I understand why the campaign pushes this line: having McCain being ‘reluctant’ to talk about his heroism but then be a hero twice over by overcoming his reluctance to share the story with us is the ultimate spin twofer. But for the reporters, please don’t treat us like we have the intelligence of field mice by trying to dump this nonsense on us.
