If John McCain wins in November, let’s hope he’s a better president than a travel agent. Last year, appearing at the Aspen Institute, he plugged the Republic of Georgia as a great tourist destination, one year before Russia invaded.

“If somebody says where can we go, really exciting and different, on a vacation, let me recommend Georgia,” he said.

If Obama is elected, may he be a better president than pundit.

“Is Senator Clinton your party’s most likely nominee?” Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson asked him.

“Yes,” Obama responded without hesitation in 2005. But as he both denied and hinted at his own presidential aspirations, he suggested that she was no shoo-in.

“She’s by far the best known. She has a terrific infrastructure. She’s extraordinarily intelligent and has shown herself to be a very able campaigner. That doesn’t mean she wins the nomination,” Obama said.

Both candidates’ past remarks at the Aspen Institute offer glimpses into their current campaigns. McCain has appeared here annually since 2005. The last two appearances came amid his latest presidential bid. Obama appeared only once, on July 2, 2005.

‘I’m not running’

Obama displayed the poise that propelled him from junior Illinois senator to presidential poll leader. Reclining in the easy chair on stage, or hunched over conversationally, he appeared relaxed in a conversation that ranged from his background to a glimpse at presidential ambitions.

“How did a skinny black guy with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, become a senator from Illinois?” Isaacson asked.

Obama suggested he wasn’t interested in running for president, but when Isaacson asked if Clinton were the strongest candidate, he made a sidelong hint at his candidacy.

“I think that it’s a wide-open field, both on the Republican and the Democratic side,” Obama said. “But if you ask me who would be the most likely candidate — you know, they have these online odds makers who can lay down your bets — I think she’s pretty substantially ahead. I was on there, despite the fact that I said I’m not running, and that shows you that they probably don’t really know what they’re talking about.”

“Is she the strongest candidate?” Isaacson pressed.

“You know, it’s so hard to say what the situation is going to be a year and a half from now,” Obama said.

‘The next messiah’

Speaking for several minutes, Obama strayed from Clinton’s candidacy to his own agenda for the party. He spotlighted three issues — the global economy, foreign policy and faith, family and values — as areas Democrats should seize on to win the House, Senate and presidency.

On the economy, Obama took issue with Republicans’ view that, as he put it, “an unfettered free market is always going to be superior, and the more unfettered it is, the better it is.”

Obama, who would be criticized later for his politics of personality, jabbed at Democrats who he said “seem to be continually looking for the next messiah. I think that’s a bad habit.”

‘An Aspen ticket’

McCain appeared at the Institute one month later, receiving its annual award along with colleague Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent who would endorse McCain at the Republican National Convention.

“I think we have an Aspen ticket right here on stage and we will nominate you,” Isaacson joked, praising their bipartisan approaches to foreign policy.

When asked who McCain’s running mate would be, he demurred. “I’m really not going to make a decision on that for a couple years, as far as even running is concerned,” he said.

Then, as now, McCain opposed direct talks with rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. Quizzed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, McCain said, “I’m glad the Europeans want to assume the leadership here. Will they be successful? I doubt it.”

Fielding a question from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, McCain praised his work. “I look forward to being able to plagiarize many of the things you write,” he joked.

He probably would not make that joke anymore. McCain’s staff have targeted the media and lambasted the Times for its critical coverage. Friedman’s Oct. 7 column took aim at what he called McCain’s “reckless” choice of running mate.

“Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel,” Friedman wrote, in words McCain won’t likely plagiarize.

A struggling campaign

McCain’s most recent Aspen visits came at very different stages of his campaign. In August 2007, he was trailing other GOP contenders. His coffers were empty. His personnel were being shuffled.

McCain at times acted more like a standup comedian than politician, riffing through oft-told jokes. He had the candor his supporters love, though, and he refused to back off unpopular stances on the Iraq war and immigration reform, despite his poll standings.

Some jokes would surface recently. “My friends, we spent $2 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. I don’t know whether that’s a criminal issue or a paternity issue,” he said, in a line he would repeat in his first debate with Obama.

McCain also blasted Alaska’s so-called “bridge to nowhere,” which Palin referred to in her convention address.

‘America first’

When McCain returned a year later, he was the party’s nominee, running neck-and-neck with Obama. Triumphal music played as he entered. Some in the audience waved flags.

McCain talked up the troop surge, an issue he has returned to in debates with Obama, whom he criticized for opposing the surge. “The strategy has succeeded and we’re winning,” he said. Although he rarely mentioned Obama by name, he criticized the troop withdrawal timetable Obama backs.

At the time, Georgia was under attack, an event he called “the first serious crisis since the Cold War.” McCain was laying out his “all of the above” energy strategy, and he ended his appearance with a hint of the “Country First” campaign slogan he would soon adopt.

“I guarantee you, I will put America first and I will never let you down,” he said.

Familiar points

At one point last year, McCain’s words sounded very much like those Obama would utter at the most recent debate.

Said McCain: “I think we passed up an opportunity after 9/11 when we told Americans to take a trip or go shopping. We should have said, ‘Join the Peace Corps. Join AmeriCorps. Join your neighborhood volunteer organizations. Serve America.’ And we could have had, and I still think we can, motivate young Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest.”

Said Obama: “You know, a lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11 and where you were on that day, and, you know, how all of the country was ready to come together and make enormous changes to make us not only safer, but to make us a better country and a more unified country. And President Bush did some smart things at the outset, but one of the opportunities that was missed was, when he spoke to the American people, he said, ‘Go out and shop.’ That wasn’t the kind of call to service that I think the American people were looking for.”

Partisan and bipartisan

They were at their most partisan on Iraq.

“(Obama) was wrong,” McCain said in his latest appearance, “and I think he used his position on Iraq for political reasons to get the nomination of his party.”

Three years earlier, Obama had defended his stance.

“I specifically said in a speech in the Plaza in Chicago — about six months before the war was launched — I said, ‘I’m not on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but I don’t see any serious evidence of weapons of mass destruction. I don’t see a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. This is going to cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and we’ll fan the flames of anti-Americanism.’ And I think I’ve been pretty restrained in not saying ‘I told you so.’”

Often, though, in the rarified air of the Aspen Institute, the two struck far less partisan tones than in the heat of presidential debates. Obama criticized “ideological warfare.” One month later, McCain blasted the “rise of extremism in both parties.”

“We need to move the government to Aspen,” Albright quipped. “Not only is the weather better, but truly the spirit of bipartisanship here is something that’s not present in Washington.”

dfrey@aspendailynews.com