toledoblade.com --

THROUGHOUT his 26-year career in public life, John McCain has presented himself as a man of honor, a fearless maverick unafraid to speak the truth even if it often refl ects poorly on his own political party.

Why, then, is the Arizona senator stumbling headlong with a largely dishonorable presidential campaign, camoufl aging his own shortcomings by fecklessly impugning his opponent’s integrity and spouting what amount to outright lies?

As evidence, we reference the McCain TV commercial blaming Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, for the high cost of gasoline; Mr. McCain’s mendacious comment that Mr. Obama went to the gym in Germany rather than visit wounded American troops, and the even more desperate claim that his opponent would lose a war in order to win the presidency.

Such vicious nonsense — nothing more than the political equivalent of drive-by shootings — gives the distinct impression that Mr. McCain is willing to destroy his own reputation for honor in order to save it, and win the November election himself.

If that sounds like an echo from the Vietnam War era, it is no accident. Mr. McCain, who built a career in public life on his 5½-year ordeal as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, seems still to be fi ghting that fruitless conflict.

He has staked his campaign for the White House on a die-hard defense of President Bush’s war in Iraq, a pledge to indefinitely continue an unjustified and unwinnable war that a large segment of the American public opposes and wants to see ended.

To obscure the fact that Mr. Obama has been on the sane side of this issue from the beginning, the McCain tactic is to impugn some sinister political motive to the Illinois senator, to declare, in effect, that he has no right to be right.

That’s poll-driven, consultant-conjured desperation speaking, not the level-headed, straight-talking public servant the American public formerly knew as John McCain.

Even some of his fellow Republicans aren’t buying it.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam vet and certainly no fuzzy-headed liberal, put the “lose a war, win the campaign” accusation in perspective.

“I think John is treading on some very thin ground here when he impugns motives and when we start to get into, ‘You’re less patriotic than me, I’m more patriotic,’ ” Mr. Hagel said. “I admire and respect John McCain very much … John’s better than that.”

In regard to the allegation that Mr. Obama dissed wounded troops in Germany in favor of a work-out, several news services examined the facts and determined it wasn’t true.

Mr. Hagel, who accompanied the senator on the Afghanistan/Iraq portion of his trip,
pointed out that Mr. Obama would have been accused of taking advantage of American soldiers for political purposes. Besides, he said, “we saw troops everywhere we went on the congressional delegation. We went out of our way to see those troops.”

As for tying Mr. Obama to high gas prices, that’s just one more scattershot charge used by GOP politicians to defl ect attention from the fact that they have been as responsible as anyone for preventing serious fuel-economy policies that could have reduced pain at the pump.

In sum, Mr. McCain does himself a disservice by engaging in the politics of prevarication.

He may win, but he’s discarding his own honor in the process.

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