HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN McCAIN!!!

Senator John McCain

71 Years Young today!

From the NY Times:

Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, who will turn 71 on Wednesday, is hoping to become the oldest person ever elected to a first term as president. So on the stump, he makes his experience a central theme of his campaign, while keeping up a grueling campaign schedule and showing his not-inconsiderable store of energy, despite injuries he sustained as a prisoner of war that limit his mobility and a bout with melanoma that left his face scarred.


Mr. McCain has recently been bombarded with questions about the viability of his campaign because of its fund-raising troubles. But on the campaign trail, his age is a subtler issue that could affect his candidacy. Persuading voters to hand one of the most difficult jobs in the world to someone at an age when most people are retiring, or at least cutting back, can be a challenge. Ronald Reagan did it, winning his first term at 69 and re-election at 73. But some political analysts said that Bob Dole’s age might have hurt him in 1996 when he ran at age 73 and against the much younger Bill Clinton.


But as people live longer, and work later, the definition of what it means to be old is changing.
Less than 1 percent of the people surveyed in a New York Times/CBS News poll in March said that the 70s were the best age for a president, while 52 percent said the 50s were the best age. And this time around, the field contains a leading candidate in his 40s (Senator Barack Obama) and several in their 50s, like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be 60 in October. Among leading Republicans, Mitt Romney turned 60 in March, and Rudolph W. Giuliani is 63. Mr. McCain said this spring that reporters seemed to show more interest in his age than the voters did, and he used his trademark humor to try to defuse the issue.

“Usually, people watch my performance to see if I need a drool cup, or
stumble around, or anything like that,”

he said at a stop in Palm Beach, Fla.

“Usually, people just come and watch me, and I try to show them the
energy and vigor that I’m capable of.”

To that end, Mr. McCain keeps up a busy travel schedule, crisscrossing the country for fund-raisers and campaign stops, and packing lots of events into campaign days. He is not one to take a lot of downtime on the trail — he is more likely to spend plane rides chatting with campaign aides or reporters than napping, and he fills in the gaps in his schedule with interviews and conference calls and other work. He has been known to pepper his conversation with youthful expressions — “um, duh!” is a favorite expression of sarcasm — and he has appeared on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” which is popular with younger audiences, 10 times, more than any other presidential candidate.


Mr. McCain has a scarred, puffy left cheek from surgery that he had in 2000 after doctors discovered his third melanoma, and it is plainly visible on television. His pale skin sometimes looks even whiter than it really is, thanks to the powerful sunblock he uses. And his war wounds — he broke both arms and his right knee when his plane was shot down over North Vietnam, and suffered more injuries at the hands of his captors during five and a half years as a prisoner of war — have left him with stiffness in his knee, and arms that he cannot raise without difficulty.


But he still has a trim, fit bearing on the campaign trail. He stays in motion at the town-hall-style events he favors, pacing back and forth with a microphone in hand while parrying questions.


Age and health have surfaced as an issue in past presidential elections, and political consultants and analysts warned that the McCain campaign must handle the topics sensitively. The risk, they said, is that any gaffe by Mr. McCain could get chalked up to age.


“Any misstep, you don’t get the benefits of the doubt: people start looking at you and start thinking of you as a 70-year-old,” said Ed Rollins, the Republican strategist who managed Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign.


Mr. Rollins said that age “was the major issue we worried about in ’84.” It grew in importance after Reagan gave some faltering answers in his first debate with Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic nominee.


Scott Reed, who managed Mr. Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, said he thought that health was a more important issue than age these days.


“You have to take health head on, and be aggressive about promoting your health records, showing a campaign style that has vigor, and most importantly not over-scheduling the candidate,” said Mr. Reed, a McCain supporter. “I think McCain has done a very good job in his addressing the issue by playing the experience card.”


When the subject of age arose for Mr. McCain on the campaign trail in Ankeny, he delivered a couple of anecdotes he often tells when he is asked about it. First he spoke about how his 95-year-old mother, Roberta, drove herself around France last year, buying a car after a rental company turned her down for one. (“I have great genes,” he told the crowd.)


And then he talked about hiking the Grand Canyon “from rim to rim” with his son Jack last August — joking that, “in full disclosure,” the trek nearly killed him.


In 1999, in Mr. McCain’s first race for president, he released 1,500 pages of his medical and psychiatric records, providing the broadest look ever given the public about the psychological profile of a presidential candidate.


The records detailed what Mr. McCain had told his doctors after his release, including how he had tried to keep his mind occupied during long periods of solitary confinement by recalling details of movies, books and philosophy. They described the extensive injuries to his shoulders, his right knee and his hip. And the records mentioned that in 1968, after he received some particularly brutal beatings from his North Vietnamese captors, Mr. McCain attempted suicide, trying to hang himself by his shirt — something that Mr. McCain seemed to allude to this spring in a speech on immigration.

“I know why people want to come here,”

he said in the speech, in which he described the risks that some immigrants take to come to the United States.

“I once thought I would rather die than be denied my country for one
more day.”

The records that he released included a battery of the standard psychological evaluations given to prisoners of the Vietnam War after their release. Dr. Michael M. Ambrose, director of the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies in Pensacola, Fla., and Dr. Jeffrey L. Moore, a clinical neuropsychologist at the center, wrote in a statement at the time that “Senator McCain has never been diagnosed with or treated at the center for a psychological or psychiatric disorder."


Mr. McCain also takes care to avoid the sun because he had had skin cancer — three melanomas from 1993 to 2000. So on the campaign trail he sometimes wears baseball caps at outdoor events, or seeks out shade.


He has released little medical information since his surgery for melanoma in 2000. His campaign has said that it will release more detailed updated medical information at some point.


So, faced with rivals who are younger, but also have put in far less time in elected office, Mr. McCain tries to make a virtue of his age.

“I’m not the youngest candidate,”

he said in his campaign-kickoff speech. “

But I am the most experienced.”

Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting.