WASHINGTON — John McCain acts like he wants you to think he's the second coming of Theodore Roosevelt.
The presumptive Republican nominee channels the 26th president -- his "ultimate hero" -- on the campaign trail, in his platform, even in an online ad in which images of the two are juxtaposed. "I am," he has said, "a Teddy Roosevelt Republican."
Why does he make this analogy? Roosevelt biographers say McCain is wedded as much to the Rough Rider image (youthful vitality and maverick independence) as to Roosevelt's stances on conserving parkland and asserting American military might.
"The main thing about Roosevelt's appeal is he's remembered by most people as an image and a style," said biographer H. W. Brands ("T.R.: The Last Romantic"), a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to Rasmussen Reports polling last year, 84% of Americans hold favorable impressions of Roosevelt -- an approval rating surpassed only by those for George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, the three presidents with whom T.R. shares Mount Rushmore.
McCain often mentions the old Rough Rider as part of a sort of GOP "holy trinity" of Roosevelt, Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani also invoked Roosevelt during the primary season.
"Sooner or later, just about every Republican who runs for president will invoke T.R.," said John Milton Cooper Jr., a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. "Usually, though, they don't know what they're talking about. McCain is more serious about it. I think he's got more justification."
For McCain, who turns 72 on Aug. 29, co-opting the bravado of the youngest man to become president (only 42 when he succeeded the assassinated William McKinley) can't hurt. After all, Roosevelt became famous for charging up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and once gave a speech with a bullet lodged in his chest. McCain has cited both as examples of courage.
Like McCain, Roosevelt feuded with corporate interests at times and struggled to win the adulation of his party's base. He was so much of a maverick that he even mounted a third-party candidacy for the White House in 1912 when he was unable to wrest the Republican nomination from William Howard Taft, who succeeded him as president in 1909.
