“A great man must always be his own man.”

— John McCain

The sharks are circling around Senator McCain.

With only $12.5 million dollars, Mr. McCain was bested by the two other leading Republican candidates during the first fundraising quarter. Governor Romney hoisted in $22 million, and Mayor Giuliani round up $15 million.

Three Democratic candidates also raised more: Senator Clinton collected $26 million, plus another $10 million from her Senate account, Senator Obama raised $25 million, and Senator Edwards got $14 million. A recent Zogby Poll of New Hampshire voters, showed that Mr. Romney had tied Mr. McCain with the vote among Republican Primary voters — they both received 25% of it.

On Sunday night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” tried to put the spotlight on Mr. McCain by making sure to complement footage of him surrounded by a phalanx of heavily-armed American troopers in Baghdad’s al Shroja market with his comments about walking freely through the market.

Both the press and the fundraising market are acting as if they sense blood in the water. The chattering class has detected several flaws in Mr. McCain’s candidacy, one of which is his age, 70, Reagan’s age his first year in office. The biggest supposed knock on Mr. McCain, though, is his support of President Bush and the war in Iraq. “They see him as too close to Bush,” a New Hampshire pollster, Dick Bennett, told the McClatchy newspapers.

These same New Hampshire voters loved John McCain in 2000, when he trounced President Bush in New Hampshire. While political alliances may have changed since then, Mr. McCain himself hasn’t. Long before Republicans, independents, and even some liberals swooned over Mr. McCain, he held the same views he holds now — that terror and despotism must be confronted and opposed.

My first conversation with Mr. McCain came out on the back porch of political consultant Robert Shrum’s Washington D.C. home in April 1998. The previous week Mr. McCain had gathered with Senators Lieberman, Kerry, Kyl, and others to talk to General Wayne Downing on how America could remove Saddam Hussein from power. “We met and had a briefing on how you might orchestrate a viable military strategy to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Mr. McCain told me amidst the sound of laughter and clinking glasses at Mr. Shrum’s home. “We continue to consult with the Congress on ways of making the Iraqi resistance more effective.” Back then, nobody contemplated an outright American invasion. Instead, the idea was for America to back an Iraqi resistance effort. That was more than three years before September 11.

The next year, the talk in Washington was of war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, who appeared to be escalating the genocide in Kosovo. Mr. McCain came out in favor of President Clinton’s use of force in the conflict. “We must not permit the genocide that Milosevic has in mind for Kosovo to continue,” Mr. McCain said. “We must take action.” Mr. McCain’s hawkish stance, unlike that of President Bush, put him at odds with him and other Republicans who saw the action as an opportunity to take a shot at an embattled president. “I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning,” then- Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said at the time. “I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”

While Mr. McCain has remained steadfast on his foreign policy from the 1990s through today, much of the world has wavered. The common thread from his time in the Navy until now has been to carry the banner of freedom. Mr. McCain’s last job in the military was as the liaison between the Pentagon and the Senate. In that position, he worked closely with Senator “Scoop” Jackson. Of Mr. Jackson, Mr. McCain writes, “he was a champion for all people deprived of their liberty and an enemy to those who sought power for themselves by disregarding the humanity of others.” The same can be said of the writer.

Right now, the political markets are reacting to the toll of the Iraq war and that is hurting the candidacy of Mr. McCain. It is the fundamental unfairness of our electoral system that we cannot separate policy with the execution of that policy. But Mr. McCain is prepared for that reality, saying, “I’d rather lose a campaign than lose a war.”

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Mr. Giuliani was rightly likened to Winston Churchill for his courageous leadership. History recalls Churchill during Great Britain’s “finest hour” when they confronted the Nazis.

Less remembered are Churchill’s lonely days as a back-bencher in Parliament when his opposition to Hitler made him a laughing stock. Asked about Churchill in the 1930s, the first woman elected to Parliament, Lady Astor replied “he’s finished.”

In 1940, Churchill became the leader of Britain. Mr. McCain may well be in his1930s Churchillian period right now. Politics may not reward candidates for swimming upstream. But posterity does.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.