UPDATE: Here’s the ad: [audio:http://www.johnmccain.com/downloads/scradio1.mp3]

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For the first time during the South Carolina presidential primary season, Sen. John McCain is taking his campaign message to the radio airwaves.

McCain’s campaign has purchased more than 1,000 ads, but “we’re not going to get into our ad strategy,” said campaign spokesman B.J. Boling, when asked if the ads were running statewide. He also would not say how much the campaign is spending.

An announcer says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Iraq war lost but that he was wrong and McCain was the only candidate calling for adding troops.

“I’ve been to Iraq nine times,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s chief South Carolina supporter, says in the 30-second ad. “The troop surge is working. Terrorists are on the run, and we need a president prepared to win.”

McCain, Graham says, “is the only candidate for president prepared to be commander in chief on day one. No candidate can match his record of service. And as all the polls indicate, he’s the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. So our party and our nation need John McCain.”

McCain has aired ads in New Hampshire and Boston for more than a month.

The ad is not the first ad favorable to McCain to get on the air here. In November, an independent group, the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America, put up a South Carolina ad praising McCain and Graham as “leaders who share our priorities” by supporting funds for U.S. troops and opposing pork-barrel spending. McCain, long an opponent of those kinds of independent ads, called on the group to pull them down. [JIM DAVENPORT - AP]