McCain fighting the label 'old and confused'

Thomas Nast's political caricatures in the early 1870s so bedeviled New York City's corrupt Boss Tweed that he once bellowed: "Stop them damn pictures! I don't care what the papers write about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures."

Not only can most of us read these days, almost everyone has a TV set. And our late-night comedians provide the exaggerated portraits - fair or not - of our political leaders.

Jimmy Carter? Inept bean counter. Ronald Reagan? Genial dope. George H.W. Bush? Clueless wimp. Bill Clinton? Randy redneck. George W. Bush? Clueless incompetent.

John McCain's caricature is being set: old man. He wisely goes along with the joke - why deny the obvious? - and tries to turn it into a plus. After all, "old" means experienced, especially when compared with a 46-year-old upstart.

But McCain must fight against those who'd add another word to the shorthand: "confused." For a Republican on the verge of turning 72 and campaigning to be commander in chief, being tagged as a confused old man could be an electoral disaster.

A series of gaffes, taken in such a context, has moved McCain toward that danger zone:

- McCain was in Jordan with Sen. Joe Lieberman on March 18 when he asserted that Iranian operatives were aiding al-Qaida fighters in Iraq. Lieberman whispered to him, and McCain corrected himself: Iran was aiding extremists, not al-Qaida.

That distinction - al-Qaida is a Sunni Muslim group while Iran is a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation - had tripped up McCain a day earlier in a radio interview. The next month, during a Senate hearing on April 8, McCain stumbled again by referring to al-Qaida in Iraq as "an obscure sect of Shiites."

- In an interview with a Pittsburgh TV station on July 9, McCain recalled how he had resisted his Vietnamese captors by refusing to give up the names of his fellow Navy pilots. Instead, he said, he recited the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Actually, McCain gave the names of Green Bay Packers. At least that's what he claimed in a 1999 memoir.

- McCain has had trouble discussing the Czech Republic. In New Mexico on July 15 for a town-hall meeting he discussed energy supplies in Czechoslovakia. But that country hasn't existed since 1993 when it became the Czech Republic and Slovakia. He had made the same mistake the previous day - and back on April 2.

- In an interview with ABC News on July 21, McCain said of Afghanistan, "We have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border." In fact, Iraq doesn't border Pakistan.

- McCain told CBS News on July 22 that the additional troops sent to Iraq by President Bush led to "the Anbar awakening," calling it "a matter of history." Actually, the "awakening" - in which Sunnis turned against al-Qaida - began before Bush announced the so-called surge. His defense of the inaccurate statement, delivered in front of the cheese section at a supermarket, didn't help.

All presidential contenders misspeak, of course, and they are amplified by a 24-hour media world. It's what reasonable people make of their mistakes that counts.

For example, Barack Obama's erroneous anecdote, related May 26, about a great-uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz - in reality, it was a subcamp of Buchenwald - suggested some confusion of his own, not a false statement designed to deceive.

More troublesome for Obama was his remark July 23 about how "we" in "my banking committee" approved a Senate bill calling for divestment from Iran. Not true - Obama doesn't serve on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and thus didn't vote on the bill even though he sponsored it. McCain's campaign sought to use the overstatement to further the charge that Obama is eager to take credit for the work of others because he has achieved so little himself.

Because of his age, future fumblings by McCain are likely to draw more attention, especially if they are about the Iraq war, his signature issue. The tipping point would come only if he were to make a mistake when it mattered - during a major speech, a key interview, a presidential debate.

In June 1975, President Ford slipped and fell while getting off Air Force One - nothing serious, an accident that could happen to anyone. Then he stumbled two more times on the same European visit and again, a month later, while climbing the stairs of Air Force One. In spite of Ford's lifetime of athletics, comics began to depict him as a klutz.

A year later, when Ford asserted during a debate with Carter that the Soviet Union didn't dominate Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the caricature of Ford as a lightweight bumbler seemed all too true. And he lost a close election.

For Obama, the caricature is not quite set. Is he an inexperienced wannabe? A smooth-talking elitist? A naive flip-flopper? As with McCain, age is a part of the portrait - not too many years but too few.

McCain aides would be happy to see Obama depicted as all of the above. But they have to hope their own candidate doesn't suffer more mental stumbles akin to the physical ones that badly bruised Gerald Ford.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Douglass K. Daniel is a writer and editor in the Washington bureau of The Associated Press.