Doug McCain: senator's son offers his own straight talk

DOUG McCAIN has a sinus thing going on.

He warned me that he wasn't feeling terrific when we set up our interview. Yet he looked fine, jaunty actually, when he sauntered into the Perked Up Coffee Cafe at the Oceanfront on Friday.

Then again, who wouldn't be in high spirits if his father had just won presidential primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida?

Slipping off a red fleece-lined jacket, McCain flipped it around to flash the slogan on the back:

  McCAIN

Straight Talk Express

Super Tuesday Tour

2008

"We just got them," he grinned, draping it over the back of a chair facing the door. Very clever.

(When his daughter, a student at UNC, called to say she'd been in the stands at the televised Boston College basketball game Thursday night, Doug McCain said he asked whether she'd worn her McCain hat. She hadn't. "I gave her a hard time. Free publicity, you know.")

Dressed in a polo shirt and casual slacks, with his Ray-Bans hanging around his neck, McCain, 48, middle-aged surfer, pilot, eldest son of the likely Republican nominee, fetched himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

"I haven't had anything to eat yet," he apologized, taking a bite.

The younger McCain is keeping a hectic schedule. He managed to sandwich two trips to Tokyo - he flies for American Airlines - between campaign visits to South Carolina and Florida. He finally headed home to Virginia Beach last week.

Like his dad, Doug McCain was a Navy pilot. He joined after graduating from the University of Virginia. The Navy brought him to the Beach in 1985. He and his wife, Ashley, live at the Oceanfront with their two children, their Tar Heel daughter and a son at Norfolk Academy.

The McCain family tree is complicated. Doug's mother, Carol, married John McCain when he and his brother were little boys. John McCain adopted them both. They also have a younger sister, born to their mom and McCain.

Doug says he vividly remembers the day his father's fighter jet was shot down over Vietnam.

"It was my first day of Cub Scouts," he said. "I came home and my mother was crying at the kitchen table."

As nearly everyone in the world knows by now, John McCain spent 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. During that awful time, Doug's mother was nearly killed in a car accident and spent six months in the hospital.

The McCains divorced when Doug was in his third year of college. Today, his mother lives near him at the Beach. Doug said his mom not only sports a McCain bumper sticker on her car but also contributed to her ex-husband's campaign.

That says something.

On Monday, Doug McCain is flying to Phoenix to be with the rest of the McCain clan when the Super Tuesday results roll in. Then it's right back to Virginia to gear up for the Feb. 12 primary.

The Beach man knows that some staunch conservatives are unhappy with his father.

"They'll warm up," Doug McCain said confidently.

What about those who say John McCain is too old to be president?

Doug McCain, who's nursing that sinus thing, breathlessly rattled off highlights from his dad's dizzying pre-Super Tuesday campaign whirlwind blowing through Georgia, Tennessee, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Missouri.

"He's not old," he laughed. "I can't keep up with him."

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net