By Rick Marschall

Each in his or her way, we have four “characters” running at the top of the tickets this year. In accepted usage, each has singular, perhaps, idiosyncratic, traits. The stuff of potential greatness – as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has said about McCain – and the stuff of potential disaster, as, well, political savants like Joy Behar and Paris Hilton say about McCain.

Supporters have the blindest eyes of all, so our national “characters” can be nobility or buffoonery. Biden’s “gaffes,” for instance, about who was president when the Great Depression hit; about FDR speaking on television before it was in commercial use; about his running mate’s definition of Middle Class; about asking a man in a wheelchair to stand up; about his position as chair of a Senate Foreign Relations committee giving him “guaranteed” information of an impending national crisis; about Obama’s readiness to be Commander-in-Chief; about his missing brain-scan data on health-disclosure forms; about stealing anecdotes from a British Labor leader’s biography and claiming they were his own family experiences; about misstating the circumstances of his wife’s death in contradiction to the police report… these are all ignored by the media or laughed off by supporters as “oh, that’s good old Joe.” But if Sarah Palin were to commit any of these, they would not be “gaffes” or mistakes but lies and imbecility.

The press corps is a bunch of characters too, eh?

But on the question of CHARACTER – an inner guiding core; not what factors make you a media “personality” – it is profitable briefly to compare McCain and Obama.

McCain served in the military; Obama did not. Neither factor is an automatic marker of character. McCain was shot down and was a prisoner of war for five years. Hardly anyone can relate to such experiences, much less be judged against them. Everyone should agree that being shot down does not qualify one to be president; being a prisoner of war brings no special insight to a statesman or diplomat.

McCain admits to adultery and episodes of carousing and drinking. He is especially ashamed of his divorce and, later as senator, errors in judgment when dealing with a savings-and-loan figure. Obama has admitted to drug use. By all evidence his family life is blameless. McCain’s Christian faith had led him to repent of the sins he committed, and in politics and private life clearly is charted by the compass of forgiveness.

This review has been somewhat more detailed about McCain, not so much because he is older, but because there are so many holes, blank periods, in Obama’s resume.

There is controversy about his real father, and his place of birth. He has refused to release his actual birth certificate.

There are questions about what he did, what he wrote for his degrees for instance, at Occidental and Columbia. He has kept all college records and these papers from being released.

There is a video tape of his hosting a celebration of a prominent Palestinian radical, where Weatherman terrorist William Ayres and other “activists” were present. He has stonewalled efforts to release that tape, and refused questions from the few journalists who have inquired.

He has been famously quiet – and famously is clad in Teflon – about Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, “Tony” Rezko, Father Fleger, the Communist Frank Marshall Davis (“my mentor”), the Muslim radical Khalidi, and others. Can Obama be appraised when he offers so few facts?

A comparison will serve.

McCain, as a prisoner of war, was tortured. Many bones were broken, by strikes or slow pressure. He was tortured. He was in solitary confinement for years. He endured, he broke down, he suffered in silence.

Obama doesn’t need a similar experience to present us a with a character assessment. McCain was offered release as a propaganda “show” – his father was a prominent admiral – but he refused to leave before his buddies in the prison camp who were there longer than he; and he was tortured more severely for that decision.

Consider Obama and HIS buddies: Ayres and his girlfriend Bernadine Dohrn bombed the Capitol building, the Pentagon, and police stations while McCain was being tortured in Viet Nam. Dubious stars of the FBI’s Most Wanted list, they hid like rats for years and then escaped prosecution because the government botched evidence – evidence that Ayres has not disputed, and, indeed, remains proud of.

Obama first denied knowing of Ayres’ past, then denied knowing him well, then – confronted with the truth – claimed that his own age at time of Ayres’ crimes, 8, freed him from the hideous appearance of consorting with an unrepentant terrorist.

So he didn’t quite throw Ayres under the bus because he clung to a false portrait for his career’s sake. That’s one way to deal with a buddy.

His treatment of Jeremiah Wright, frothy racist in ministerial dashikis, is a better barometer of his treatment of friends. Intimate member of the family, officiating at Barry and Michelle’s wedding, the spiritual guide for 20 years, when his hate-filled messages were broadly made public, Wright saw his “friend” first deny knowing the citywide notorious views, then eloquently assert his inability to deny Wright as a friend… and finally to see Obama bail on the church and toss the “reverend” under the bus.

There are other examples, all of the same pattern: resumes hidden; resumes padded. Friends denied; friends abandoned. Mocking working people and their values in private meetings caught on tape; pandering to them in orchestrated and choreographed public spectacles. Exercising “community organizing” – the Marxist program developed by Saul Alinsky – and Marxist economics but portraying them as Norman Rockwell confections. All for the sake of a career and ambition.

Remember, the other choice in this campaign is someone who endured torture and humiliation for friends similarly treated in cells next to him. He knew them, and he wouldn’t betray them. John McCain also endured all that for friends he DIDN’T know – the people back home. Will they stick with him?

There are many ways to assess “character.” Judging a man by the company he keeps is one of the oldest, and truest, ways.

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Rick Marschall has been called by Bostonia Magazine "perhaps America's foremost authority on popular culture.” He is the Managing Editor of Rare Jewel Magazine, the Christian journal of politics and culture; and founding and Contributing Editor of Hogan's Alley, Journal of the Cartoon Arts. The author/editor of 62 books, he has been a political cartoonist, columnist, syndicate editor, publisher, and lecturer. His wide experience includes Editor at Marvel Comics, writer for Disney Comics, consultant to the US Postal Service, and lecturer for the US Information Service of the State Department. He has been on the faculties of the School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), and the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Bryn Mawr University.