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McCain rides on a wave of optimism

BY KEITH HERBERT | keith.herbert@newsday.com

11:36 PM EST, February 5, 2008

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., greets supporters at a Super Tuesday presidential primary elections night in Phoenix. (AP Photo / February 6, 2008)

PHOENIX - In July, when John McCain got off the plane in New Hampshire, he carried his own bags.

His "Straight Talk Express" at the time was a passenger van, not the 40-foot coach that snaked its way through Manhattan yesterday.

Back then, the Arizona senator met with crowds of 100 people or fewer, not the thousands who now attend his rallies.

The past six months have been a reversal of fortune for McCain, and his strong showing on Super Tuesday puts him closer to winning the Republican Party's presidential nomination.

"He literally picked the campaign up and carried it on his back," said Steve Duprey, a McCain volunteer from Concord, N.H., who has been traveling with the candidate. "I'm 54 years old, and it was a great lesson in leadership," Duprey said.

If nothing else, McCain's position as front-runner is a case study of determination. In 2000, a bid to win the GOP nomination failed with George W. Bush defeating him. This time out, his campaign stumbled, and he trailed former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in early polls.

"Senator McCain has put on an unbelievable campaign, when you think about where the senator was in the middle of the summer and the early fall, because of his determination," Giuliani said Monday while campaigning with McCain in Hamilton, N.J.

McCain started yesterday with an early-morning rally in Rockefeller Center and then flew to San Diego, where he held a rally inside an airport hangar.

Despite being a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and escaping death in 1967 when his ship, the USS Forrestal, caught fire and 134 men were killed, McCain told voters on the trail that he always remained an optimist, and promised he'd bring that quality to the presidency.

In San Diego, he noted: "As I've said on numerous occasions, here's a guy who stood fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. If my old company officer, a Marine captain, were here today, he'd say, 'In America anything is possible.'"