NEW YORK — You would think that calling yourself a friend of Sen. John F. Kerry, touting frequent alliances with the Democratic presidential nominee and defending his Vietnam War record would not make you a particularly popular figure this week inside the Republican National Convention.
Yet that is just what Sen. John McCain did Sunday morning inside Madison Square Garden -- talking about the Democrat even as he prepared to headline tonight's opening of a four-day convention designed to keep the Republican incumbent, President Bush, in the White House.
McCain's remarks placed the famously independent Arizona senator right where he has enjoyed being for much of the last year: courted by both candidates and, unique among his contemporaries, mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate or Cabinet appointee by both major parties.
Those who know McCain well, however, say he is not focused on the prospect of working in someone else's White House, but on protecting his treasured political iconoclasm, soaking up the adulation it brings and keeping open the possibility of a presidential run in 2008.
As he turned 68 Sunday, the tight-jawed former Navy pilot with the wispy white hair was the toast of Republican New York -- feted in a midday luncheon at tony 21 and celebrated that evening at a dinner with media moguls and the anchors of all three network news programs.
"He would be a very good president," McCain's aunt, 92-year-old Rowena Willis, said Sunday before the first of the birthday parties. "But don't you think he might be too old? I don't know."
A successful 2008 campaign would put McCain in office at age 72, older than Ronald Reagan, who became the oldest man elected to the presidency with his 1980 victory at the age of 69. Although he has recovered fully after having malignant melanomas removed four years ago, McCain's age and health would almost certainly become campaign issues in a presidential run.
In explaining the reluctance to disavow a future candidacy, McCain for years has fallen back on a line from the late Morris K. Udall, the onetime presidential candidate and Democratic Arizona congressman, who said: "Potomac fever is a disease which can only be cured by embalming fluid."
McCain's continuing interest in the presidency partly helps explain, according to people familiar with his thinking, why he has increasingly fallen into the embrace of Bush, a man he held in none-too-shrouded contempt after their primary election showdown in 2000.
