McCain goes down memory lane

Marsha Mercer / Media General Washington Bureau
Published: April 6, 2008

WASHINGTON – While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engage in mortal combat that could render the survivor unelectable in November, John McCain has the luxury of campaigning as a winner. Last week, he took a trip down memory lane.

The idea, his campaign said, was to introduce McCain to voters. That means McCain wants a new image. News reports about his temper and friendship with a lobbyist have tarnished his sterling.

He’s not the first in this campaign to want a fresh start. When she launched her presidential bid in January 2007, Hillary Clinton called herself “the most famous person you really don’t know.” She wasn’t hard as nails. To the contrary, she’s tough enough – and warm and caring besides. She’s still fighting the image battle.

McCain also is going for his softer side. He’s not the cranky old neighborhood coot who yells at kids to get off his lawn. He’s a high-minded gentleman who’s funny and almost cool.

And forget news reports that he intervened with the FCC on behalf of lobbyist Vicki Iseman’s client, Paxson Communications. McCain is an authentic fighter against special interests.

His “biography tour” took him to places of his youth – his old high school, the Naval Academy, the Navy base where he learned to fly. Unfortunately for McCain, nearly every stop reinforced what people already knew. He’s old and he has a temper.

Eisenhower was president when McCain graduated from high school in 1954. He’ll turn 72 Aug. 29 and would be the oldest first-term president ever.

McCain can’t deny he’s old or has a temper, so he makes jokes. Every presidential candidate likes to go on late-night TV to prove what fun people they are. McCain traded jokes with David Letterman again last week. Letterman said McCain reminded him of “the guy at the hardware store who makes the keys” and “the guy who can’t stop talking about how well his tomatoes are doing” and other jibes.

McCain, looking like Mr. Magoo trying to see his cue cards, said to Letterman, “Well you look like a guy whose laptop would be seized by the authorities,” among other quips.

The senator evidently thinks being too cool for school five decades ago will help him with today’s voters. Lest anyone forget he was a dismal student who broke rules and was a hot head, McCain stressed these traits on his nostalgia tour.

At Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., he said, “I made my resentment clear in my usual immature ways to upperclassmen and school officials, piling up demerits and earning the distinction at the end of the year of ‘worst rat.’”

And, said the man who famously has screamed obscenities at Senate colleagues, “If my detractors had known me here … they might marvel at the self-restraint and mellowness I developed as an adult.” Or not.

At the Naval Academy, where he finished fifth from the bottom of his class, he said he accumulated so many demerits and pulled so much marching duty that he could have marched from Annapolis to Baltimore and back 17 times. That might be a record, he said.

He burbled that in the years since he has learned that “life is rich with irony and unexpected twists of fate” His accomplishments are a testimony to the country as a land of opportunity, he said.

“In America, everything is possible,” he said.

Yes, in McCain’s America, even a kid who went to an exclusive private high school and whose father and grandfather were admirals was able to get into the Naval Academy.

And now he’s asking for four years, and maybe eight, in the White House, where, at least in campaign ads, the phone always rings at 3 a.m. He says his experience and character prepare him for the job. It sounds old-fashioned in a year when change is on everyone else’s lips.

But the new John McCain sounds a lot like the old John McCain.

If he really wants a new image, he could show it with his choice of a running mate. McCain teased that he already has a list of about 20 contenders and said he won’t wait until the last minute.

But then, he has time to weigh his choices while the Democrats slug it out.