On the Web, Supporters of McCain Wage An Uphill Battle

And these days, he may have some hidden friends. "I'm in the closet about being a McCain supporter," says University of Illinois med student Chase Donaldson, 23. When he was an undergrad at the liberal-leaning St. Olaf College near Minneapolis, Donaldson says, conservative students were wary of letting teachers learn their political views. And not all of his conservative friends, he says, are for McCain. So online, he's not a member of any pro-McCain Facebook groups.

Some net-savvy Republicans unconnected to the McCain campaign have taken it upon themselves to make up ground. After McCain clinched the nomination in March, Patrick Ruffini, who served as webmaster for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004 and advised Rudy Giuliani on his Web strategy, created a Facebook group, "The John McCain Facebook Challenge." The group has about 6,300 members -- not exactly a groundswell. But Ruffini is optimistic.

"I don't know if McCain will beat Obama on these sites, or that he even needs to," he says. Hillary Clinton "was never as popular as Obama online, and she got close to getting the nomination."

On YouTube, there's a channel called "FansofMcCain" created by a singer named Ed -- he declines to give his last name -- who has written "a 1960s, surf-rock kind of tune" set to a slide show of McCain photos: "As a prisoner of war, he stood by his country. As a member of Congress, he's done the same." And there's a one-minute mash-up of images, text and videos evoking McCain's heroism called "McCain Generation" that was posted in April by Ethan Eilon, head of the College Republican National Committee.

Eilon's video has been viewed about a thousand times. Ed's surf-rock number has been viewed about 2,700 times.

Compare that with the YouTube channel called BraveNewFilms, founded by the liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The channel's "The Real McCain" series is a YouTube hit, with a three-minute mash-up titled "McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare." It's a volley of quick clips showing McCain apparently contradicting himself again and again. In its final seconds, McCain says firmly, "I voted against the tax cuts." Instantly afterward, he's seen saying, "I've always been for tax cuts."

"Nightmare" has been viewed more than 2.5 million times.

You can do the math, but the McCain supporters say they're not giving up. Ask Mitsotakis, the 19-year-old history buff. He first heard of McCain while watching a documentary on the History Channel. Like McCain, he supports the Iraq war. "We needed to get rid of Saddam," he says, "and we cannot pull out now because of security, economic and humanitarian consequences."

He regularly comments on McCain's Facebook page. Last Sunday, he posted a link to a news story on Facebook and headlined it: "Obama and the Dems won't admit progress in Iraq, but Iran will."

Returning to the World War II analogy, he says: "I feel like the Americans in Bastogne, which is not to say that the Obama supporters are the Nazis. That's not what I'm saying.

"It's just the experience of being surrounded but still holding strong, still going, still fighting."

Because in the end, as Mitsotakis likes to point out, the outnumbered troops won the battle.