McCain breaks ranks with 9/11 rally

While rivals stay off stump, senator stops in Iowa

M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 12, 2007 at midnight

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SIOUX CITY, Iowa - Sen. John McCain made no apologies Tuesday for breaking with recent campaign tradition and holding a partisan political rally on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

With fellow prisoners of war and military veterans at his side, McCain launched a seven-day "No Surrender" tour at an aircraft hangar in Sioux City, Iowa, hoping to build support for the war in Iraq.

It comes at a time when the U.S. Senate has been grilling the top war commander, Gen. David Petraeus, over the results of a so-called troop "surge" earlier this year - and as many fellow lawmakers, including some from McCain's Republican party, are stepping up calls for a troop withdrawal or a dramatic shift in strategy.

"We can either choose to support our troops and support this strategy - one that is succeeding and is winning - or we can choose to lose," McCain told a campaign crowd standing under three giant American flags. "I choose to win. And I choose to support these young men and women."

Other top presidential contenders chose more low-key ways to mark the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. They attended memorial services, posted remembrance messages on their Web sites, and conducted official business.

But most stayed off the campaign trail and away from anything even vaguely resembling the typical campaign "rally."

But McCain, whose morning included a moment of silence in the U.S. Senate and prayers at a church, said a rally supporting the war effort was the best way to honor the victims of the terrorist attacks.

"The important thing about Sept. 11 is that it not be repeated," McCain told reporters after the event. "And if we leave Iraq, then it will be repeated."

"I can't think of a better way to remember and revere their memories and prevent further tragedies and attacks on the United States than to rally support for what Gen. Petraeus in his testimony today (said) was now the central battlefield in the war against terror, Iraq," McCain said.

On Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., McCain defended Petraeus, even as some of the Democratic presidential contenders questioned his relatively upbeat progress report and called on him to say more precisely how long U.S. forces would need to stay in harm's way.

On the campaign trail, McCain has called the early years of the war effort "mismanaged," and he was among those who pushed for President Bush to deploy additional troops. Since that "surge" was announced earlier this year, McCain's fortunes in the race for the Republican presidential nomination have appeared to be closely tied to the success of the war.

So he came to Col. Bud Day Field, an air base named after the fellow Vietnam prisoner of war who stood next to him on stage, and told a couple hundred folks they must stick behind the war effort.

"For almost four years, we pursued a failed policy in Iraq, and I argued for the strategy that's now succeeding," McCain told the crowd.

"All of us want our troops home, but we want them home with honor," McCain said.

McCain was joined on stage by Bud McFarland, former National Security Adviser under then President Ronald Reagan, along with his one-time prisoner of war cellmates and some young veterans of the war in Iraq.

With these backers, McCain appeared more energized than he has in recent appearances, as his campaign has suffered from a summer full of financing woes, staff defections and slipping poll numbers - both nationally and in Iowa, where the first caucus votes are scheduled in January.

"He's real. He's one of the few that is real," said audience member Al Tobin, 68, an RV salesman who splits time between Sioux City and Mesa, Ariz.

Tobin, a longtime McCain supporter, scoffed at candidates who stayed off the campaign trail on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"It's a political gimmick," he said. "It makes headlines, really."

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