The far more powerful approach is to focus on McCain's demonstrable flaws, which he lists thusly:
McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.
McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.
McCain has a legendarily short fuse.
McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.
McCain's straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.
McCain, who says that he is hesitant to speak about his time in the Hanoi Hilton, or his war service in general, demonstrated this sanctimonious streak last week:
On Thursday, Walter Isaacson was the latest pundit to publicly call out the Mama Mia-loving presumptive Republican presidential nominee during an interview at the Aspen Institute in Colorado.
"If there is anything I am lacking in, I've got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life," McCain said in his own defense. "I've got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again."
and it bleeds over to his staff, who drop the POW card any time McCain is questioned, for anything:
Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview. A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain said he was en route to the church.
Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.
Aside from that, he has confused Sunni with Shia, imagined the existence of Czechoslovakia, and relentlessly confused the geography of Western Asia, imagining a border between Pakistan and Iraq.
As dozens of articles have pointed out, McCain has flipped on just about all of his "maverick" positions in the past four years, including the use of torture, the Bush tax cuts, immigration reform, timetables for withdraw, wiretapping and FISA,gay marriage, affirmative action, ANWR, and so many more, that the mere notion of describing him as anything other than a Bush clone is absurd.
In many ways, he represents the worst of the last three Republican Presidents, he's as old and confused as Reagan, as dim and unimpressive as Bush I, and a vindictive and short tempered bully like W. This is where Obama should hit McCain, by calling him out on his "maverick" bologna, his age and mental acuity, and his general temperament.
UPDATE: As dday points out, another manifestation of the McCain character is a wee bit of a problem with telling the truth:
So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time
by dday
Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are some more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain's growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday's Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.
In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would "rely heavily on" for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.
Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.
And, he claimed that he would never have nominated Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, though he voted to confirm all three of them.
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