By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 4, 2008; 9:53 AM

KANSAS CITY-- While the traveling press corps was shipped off to a barbecue restaurant here, John McCain charmed his way through an interview with a local TV reporter. Surae Chinn of KCTV posed such less-than-penetrating questions as "How important is Missouri?" and "Have you chosen a running mate?" and -- addressing the candidate's wife Cindy -- "How do you make your marriage work?"

Moments later, though, the Republican candidate seemed to grow annoyed with the Kansas City Star's Steve Kraske, who pressed him on his recent comment that "nothing is off the table" when it comes to strengthening Social Security.

When Kraske said that McCain presumably wasn't ruling out a payroll tax hike, McCain interrupted: "That's presuming wrong." When the reporter rephrased the question, McCain said: "If you want to keep asking me over and over again, you're welcome to."

It was a brief moment of friction that highlighted how the captain of the Straight Talk Express is having a bumpier ride with journalists than when he ran for president eight years ago. The popular image of the campaign -- McCain bantering with national journalists in the back of his bus -- has, in practice, all but vanished. The traveling press is now routinely stiffed in favor of five-minute sit-downs with local reporters.

At the same time the Arizona senator is having trouble making news, or at least news that advances his campaign's goals, and when he does it is often reacting to the media hurricane that surrounds Barack Obama.

In 2000, when top news executives were clamoring for a chance to ride the fabled bus, McCain would spend hours talking to reporters who would write one story a day. "Now, with each bus trip, everyone's filing a blog report, every little thing is picked up and off it goes," says Slate correspondent John Dickerson. "It certainly takes him off message."

McCain adviser Steve Duprey, a former chairman of New Hampshire's Republican Party, says "he'd love to be back on the bus, driving around with eight or 10 of you, and just riffing. In New Hampshire, if he'd say something that wasn't artfully phrased, there was more of a flow -- he could revise something, or say let's talk about baseball. He'd get a pass. But in the age of blogs, there's always someone who makes a big deal out of it."

McCain is "pained" at all but ending the sessions, says spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush White House communications director, but "we have to find a balance. He won the primary essentially on a bus with the press. . . . He's intensely loyal to the back-and-forth with the press. It's who he is. It will always be part of our mix."

It wasn't part of the mix last week. National correspondents traveling with the candidate did not get to ask McCain a question for four days, and grew angry when a short media availability was scheduled for late afternoon Friday in Panama City, Fla. -- too late to do them much good and requiring extra flights for those who had planned to head home for the weekend.

While the front of McCain's plane was reconfigured with a couch and two captain's chairs to allow for easy conversation, journalists say he has invited them up only once, on a trip to Colombia. On the ground, his availability is sometimes limited to a quick gaggle with a small group of pool reporters.

Obama doesn't mingle much with his press corps either -- he made an exception on his recent world tour -- but that has never been a core part of his strategy.

McCain is less engaging as a scripted candidate. But his strategists are convinced that the perpetual access was eroding their ability to drive a message, forcing the candidate to play on the media's turf by responding to flap-of-the-day questions, such as top adviser Carly Fiorina's lament that many health plans cover Viagra but not birth control.

But the aides say McCain would get hammered by the press if they restricted access even further, given his repeated insistence that such a move would destroy his credibility.

While many problems are of McCain's own making, it often seems that he can't catch a break. He stood beside an oil pump in a dusty Bakersfield, Calif., field last week, trying to dramatize his support for offshore drilling while painting Obama as "the Doctor No of America's energy future."

But the clip played on ABC's "World News" and the cable networks was of McCain, who has a history of skin cancer, explaining to reporters why a mole had been removed from his face. It was the sole focus of a New York Times story on his day. And in a CNN sit-down, Larry King's opening questions were about the excised skin, which turned out to be benign.

Republican strategists not affiliated with McCain say his campaign seems to lurch from one tactic to the next and has been largely devoid of new ideas that might draw sustained coverage.

"The McCain campaign's challenge in this Obama environment is to be consistent and drive a daily message for more than two days in a row," says Scott Reed, who managed the 1996 presidential campaign of another septuagenarian senator, Bob Dole. "It's hard, it's frustrating, but it needs to get done. The surrogates are off message every day. They're all over the place. They need to echo what McCain says."

Mark McKinnon, a McCain adviser who left the campaign after the primaries, says the media are "overhyping" Obama, but that things will even out by the fall.

"I think they've done a good job of calling foul on the refs" in the press, McKinnon says. "We're seeing more critical coverage that might not have happened if the McCain campaign had not blown the whistle. I don't think the McCain camp should get hysterical and go out and try to do something different."

Asked if McCain should spend so much time responding to Obama, thus letting him set the story line, McKinnon says: "It's hard not to react when there's this blazing comet across the sky."

If that has eclipsed the Republican's campaign, the staging of McCain's events hasn't helped. When Obama was in Israel, McCain was awkwardly chatting up shoppers in the cheese aisle of a Bethlehem, Pa., supermarket, where at one point several jars of applesauce came tumbling off a shelf. When Obama was drawing a huge crowd in Berlin, McCain was visiting Schmidt's Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio, placing an order of chocolate cream puffs to go.

Beyond the stagecraft, there is a sameness to McCain's schedule that works against breaking into the news cycle: town hall meeting, local interviews, fundraiser.

McCain is clearly energized by the town halls, even as he tells the same tired jokes he was using in 1999 (about how he "hasn't always won the title of Miss Congeniality" in Congress and how its approval rating is "down to paid staffers and blood relatives"). In Racine, Wis., he was asked about taxes, college aid and whether Brett Favre should leave the Green Bay Packers. McCain's answers were crisp and forceful, but he said nothing he hasn't said dozens of times -- and therefore made no news.

Such generally friendly questions are now deemed preferable to responding to reporters. After touring a tractor factory Wednesday in Aurora, Colo., McCain kept walking when Associated Press correspondent Beth Fouhy shouted a question at him about the indictment of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens. The press corps had no chance to get a comment on his controversial ad likening Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

On Thursday in Wisconsin, the reporters were itching to ask about the campaign's accusation that Obama was "playing the race card" by suggesting that McCain was trying to marginalize him as someone who didn't look like other presidents on dollar bills. When CNN's John King was interviewing the senator for a profile to run before the Republican convention -- and raised the race-card flap at the end -- aides tried to cut him off. McCain gave a 10-second answer and ended the interview with a quick handshake as King tried to follow up. The aides later chastised King for raising a subject that was not part of the agreed-upon agenda.

On the bus ride to the airport, four Milwaukee journalists were invited on the Straight Talk, in keeping with the new policy of generally reserving such trips for local reporters. This time, Fouhy asked the local AP scribe on that bus to question McCain about the race charge, and made sure the senator's defense of the charge hit the national wire.

During the subsequent flight to Orlando, McCain remained in the front cabin, which was cordoned off by a curtain. The only journalist ushered into his presence was a writer for Marie Claire magazine. In the old days, reporters would have had hours to chew over the latest controversy, and plenty of other subjects, with McCain. But for a campaign struggling to regain control of its message, the old days are definitely gone.

Here are two diametrically opposite views of the battle to define Obama, the first from National Review's Rich Lowry:

"Responding to a McCain ad knocking him as a world celebrity, Barack Obama essentially accused the McCain campaign of race-baiting. It was a hair-trigger resort to the charge of racism of the sort that [Jesse] Jackson built a career on, making himself radioactive and anathema to the political center . . .

"The McCain ad had a serious point, one the Obama campaign obviously felt it couldn't ignore. Obama can be as arrogant, gassy and remote as other members of the country's aristocracy of fame. If this celebrity framework is successfully imposed on Obama, the entire repertoire of Obamania -- the mass rallies, the soaring eloquence, the picturesque cool of the candidate himself -- risks becoming a liability . . .

"Obama hopes to use the racism card to inhibit all criticism of him, with the presumed cooperation of the press. But there's a much larger downside. Obama's race is a political advantage so long as it is sold in a post-racial context. If his background is a symbol of how we can get beyond the poisoned atmosphere of both racism and the hyperactive, opportunistic charges of racism, it's a boon to his change-and-unity candidacy . . . Now, Obama could throw it away in a fit of self-destructiveness worthy of . . . dare we say it, Britney Spears?"

But HuffPost's Bob Cesca sees a plain old smear campaign:

"Pat Buchanan on Hardball Monday night wondered out loud about Senator Obama: 'Is he one of us?'

"If by 'one of us' he means a cranky, elitist, white, corporate media, man-shaped bunion who fashioned his career by demonizing brown people, the answer is a certain 'no'. But we know what Buchanan meant by this. Is Senator Obama with 'us' or is he with the uppity blacks? Is he a real American like Senator McCain or is he a Muslim terrorist like those e-mails suggest? Is he too European (GAY!)? Is he like us: white, wealthy, conservative, elite?

"During this dark ride of the Bush years, it's no longer surprising or shocking to hear such a bottomless cup of awfulness. This line of questioning has become the dominant theme in the corporate media's political narrative. 'Us' has become a baseline which liberals -- regardless of race or gender -- will never achieve because the experiment is stacked against anyone who isn't centrist, moderate, right of center or conservative . . .

"The corporate media accepts their terms, their rules and their frames as a given and the Democrats are expected to jump and dash and explain themselves based upon those givens, irrespective of how ludicrous they happen to be . . . Prove to us, Senator Obama, that you're not a tabloid pop star. Prove to us that you're not a bleached blonde heiress or a slack-jawed ex-Mouseketeer."

You may not be shocked to learn that The Washington Post has run more pictures of Obama than McCain since the primaries ended--122 to 78. More stories, too.

McCain was once beloved by the pundits, but now he has lost Joe Klein:

"A few months ago, I wrote that John McCain was an honorable man and he would run an honorable campaign. I was wrong. I used to think, as David Ignatius does, that McCain's true voice was humble and moderate, but now I'm beginning to think his Senate colleagues may be right about his temperament . . .

"Courage is grace under pressure. McCain showed it when he was a prisoner of war, and on many issues--yes, even on his stubborn insistence that the surge would work--but he is not showing it now. He is showing flop sweat. It is not a quality usually associated with successful leadership."

Obama has been accused of many things, and now the WSJ has the inside skinny on a new problem:

"Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn't give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

" 'Listen, I'm skinny but I'm tough,' Sen. Obama said.

"But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them . . .

" 'He's too new . . . and he needs to put some meat on his bones,' says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

" 'I won't vote for any beanpole guy,' another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board."

Puh-leaze! Does it take a beer gut to get elected in this country?

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."