One of John McCain's campaign weak spots is his age, so cruelly mocked by Paris Hilton earlier this week. With that in mind, was it really a good idea for his website to include this timeline?
You could understand it if it compared the Arizona senator's lifetime of service to the United States as a soldier and politician with the more slight life experience of Barack Obama, who is 25 years his junior.
But it doesn't. Instead the timeline is matched to US history, and stretches back to 1840, leading the casual reader to assume McCain is a sprightly 168 years old.
As such, it includes the American civil war, the Spanish-Amercian war and the 1871 Chicago fire, as well as the birth of "Slew" McCain, the Republican candidate's grandfather, in 1884. Even ignoring the events that took place before McCain's birth, the timeline can't help but draw attention to the fact that the young McCain lived through not just the second world war but also the Great Depression.
To make matters worse, the whole thing is navigated using a "time shuttle", which makes it sound like the reader is travelling back to the stone age. If this is their idea of presenting their candidate in a good light, it's probably best all round that the McCain campaign is mainly concentrating on attacking his opponent.
