McCain launches ‘biography’ tour

Republican John McCain took his “biography tour” to Mississippi today as Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton stumped in Pennsylvania three weeks before that state’s crucial primary.

During a weeklong tour to “reintroduce” himself to voters, the Arizona senator, who has already clinched the GOP presidential nomination, visited Meridian, Miss., where generations of McCains were raised and where a local air base is named for his grandfather and namesake John Sidney “Popeye” McCain, who was a flight instructor and admiral.

“As a boy, my family legacy, as fascinating as it was to me, often felt like an imposition,” said the 71-year-old McCain.

“I knew from a very early age that I was destined for Annapolis and a career in the Navy,” he said, referring to his eventual enrollment in the U.S. Naval Academy, and “often rebelled in small and petty ways to what I perceived as an encroachment on my free will.”

McCain’s tour, meant to capture voter attention while his two Democratic rivals are still battling it out for the nomination, may also soften conservative discomfort with the maverick senator, who has strayed from Republican orthodoxy on issues such as immigration and campaign reform.

McCain, who opposed the Bush administration’s tax cuts because they were not linked to spending controls, said today that “government spending must not be squandered on things we do not need and can’t afford.” Arguing that schools were lagging, he said, “government can’t just throw money at public education while reinforcing the failures of many of our schools but should, by choice and competition, be rewarding good teachers and holding bad teachers accountable.”

On Tuesday, McCain will go to the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where he went to high school; on Wednesday, he will return to Annapolis, where he finished fifth from the bottom of his class at the academy. Later in the week the campaign will head to Florida, where McCain trained as a Navy pilot, and Arizona, where he got his start in politics. Meanwhile, the campaign has started running a new ad on its website touting his “service to America.” McCain was shot down in Vietnam and held for more than five years as a prisoner of war.

As McCain campaigned in Mississippi, Obama picked up another superdelegate today when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota today endorsed him as the party’s presidential nominee, dealing a blow to Clinton.

“Between Barack and a hard place, I chose Barack,” Klobuchar said in a conference call with reporters, explaining that the “hard place” was her own ambivalence. “My endorsement reflects both Barack’s strong support in my state and my own independent judgment about his abilities,” she said.

Saying that either candidate would be a strong president, Klobuchar, who modeled her own campaign on that of Clinton’s successful run for the Senate in New York, said she chose Obama, the Illinois senator, because he speaks to a new generation of Americans, such as her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail.

“He is a new kind of leader,” Klobuchar said. “He speaks with a different voice. He brings a new perspective and inspires a real excitement from the American people. He’s able to dissolve the hard cynical edge that has dominated our politics under the Bush administration.”

Klobuchar said Obama’s “impressive” showing in Minnesota on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, helped convince her, as did Abigail, who told her that keeping quiet was “awkward, Mom.”

But the Minnesota senator did not join calls for Clinton to withdraw from the race.

“I believe that Sen. Clinton has every right to continue her campaign,” Klobuchar said. “… I have faith that our candidates will figure this out and that this will come to a conclusion in early summer.”

johanna.neuman@latimes.com