Senator John McCain's personal character has dominated the image and perception of him. His family's military heritage, his rebellious nature as a youth, his endurance over his treatment as a prisoner of war, his resulting physical limitations, his political persona, his well-known temper, his admitted propensity for controversial or ill-advised remarks, and his devotion to maintaining his large blended family have all defined his place in the American political world more than any ideological or partisan framing (although the latter became more prominent beginning in 2008).
Military experiences
McCain's experiences as a POW have formed the basis for some of his public and political image. University of Richmond political scientist John Karaagac states that, "The military holds a special place in American society and in American democracy. In both war and peace, the military becomes the archetype of democratic values and aspirations... The competing tension of intense institutional loyalty on one hand and guardian of the republic on the other [leads to a situation where] the military view of politics is bound to be ambivalent." Karaagac then sees McCain as a focal point of this tension and ambivalence. In part, this is due to McCain's family history: public service is idealized in military tradition, whereas politics is deprecated, and this was the tradition in McCain's family as well. Yet McCain's father also served as a Congressional liaison for a while, and was able to be politically effective without seeming overtly so; part of McCain's youth was spent seeing a steady stream of powerful politicians entertained at his family's house. When McCain first began his Senate liaison work, he held congressional leaders in poor regard, due to their actions during and after the Vietnam War. But once he began working with them closely, he found a number of them he admired: "They were statesmen, and although some of them had never served in uniform, I came to appreciate that most were patriots of the first order."
American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky sees McCain's POW experience as being uniquely suited for his country's perceptions of the Vietnam War: "It was by suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances, thereby redeeming some notion of American honor in a dishonorable situation, that McCain became an American hero." This assessment is echoed by The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who says that "McCain's is not the heroism of conquest or even rescue, but of endurance, and, even more important, endurance for principle. ... [his] suffering has become in the public imagination a kind of expiation for the war itself. It explains why even people so ideologically distant from him find his experience so moving and his appeal so powerful." The New Republic writer David Grann also concurs in this assessment of McCain's real heroism, but emphasizes that during the 1990s the U.S. national media often overlooked not only political and ideological beliefs of McCain's contrary to theirs, but biographical blemishes as well, in a revival of an old American tradition of hero-building that goes back to Parson Weems. Journalist Andrew Ferguson describes instances where journalists who grew up in the Vietnam era have felt guilt for not having served themselves, and once in contact with McCain have viewed and written favorably about him as a result; the same pattern has been observed by Tomasky and by author David Brock. Longtime Washington journalist Al Hunt states that "The hero is indispensable to the McCain persona" and sees the courage McCain showed as a prisoner of war directly linked to the courage required to take on "the link between money and politics [that] is pervasive throughout American history." Writer Michael Lewis views McCain's political "nerve [as] far more interesting than bravery in combat. It was the nerve of a man engaged in an experiment of behaving like a human being when everyone around him was playing this strange, artificial game."