McCain Gets Praise, Not Backing, From Grahams

Senator John McCain, who has had trouble courting faith-based voters, went to the mountaintop on Sunday — Billy Graham’s Blue Ridge mountaintop retreat in western North Carolina, that is — and met with the evangelist and his son the Rev. Franklin Graham for a private, 45-minute conversation.

There were no endorsements after the meeting at the rustic retreat, called Little Piney Cove, and both sides portrayed it as nonpolitical — just a chance to talk over old times and pray for God’s blessing on the presidential election and the candidates. But afterward, there were encomiums all around.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, had requested the meeting with the Grahams. He called his hosts “great leaders” and said they had had “an excellent conversation.” In response to a reporter’s question, he said, as if slightly surprised: “Oh, I didn’t ask for their vote.”

Billy Graham, 89, who has counseled American presidents for the last half-century and is an enormously influential voice among millions of evangelical and born-again Christians, has been in poor health and made no statement.

But Franklin Graham, who met last week with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the likely Democratic nominee, issued a statement praising Mr. McCain. “I was impressed by his personal faith and his moral clarity on important social issues facing America today,” said Mr. Graham, who noted that he and Mr. McCain, of Arizona, have sons serving in the military.

Franklin Graham, chief executive of the evangelistic association his father founded in 1950, and Mr. McCain recalled a story Billy Graham had told about meeting the senator’s father, a Navy admiral, and mother in Hawaii when Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “He visited my parents in Hawaii twice,” Mr. McCain said, “and he and my mother and father prayed together for me.”

“We had an opportunity to pray for the senator and his family, and for God’s will to be done in this upcoming election,” Franklin Graham said. Though he was not endorsing anyone, he said he was urging “men and women of faith everywhere” to “vote for the candidate at every level who best represents their values and convictions.”