It's getting awfully difficult to be John McCain -- or at least his press flacks. In recent days, the McCain campaign has been in full spin mode in an attempt to convince the elite media (and through them the American public) that McCain himself did not say that he would be content leaving American forces in Iraq for 100 years, which he most certainly did say. They have also tried to play down McCain's clearly absurd claim that earmarks caused the interstate bridge to collapse in Minnesota. Now they're trying to spin themselves out of another McCain-made mess regarding Iraq, as the AP's Libby Quaid reports.

Republican John McCain was forced to clarify his comments Friday suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.

At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver.

"My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East," McCain said.

The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn't mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

"No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons," McCain told reporters.

[...]

It was the second time in as many days that McCain had to clarify his comments. On Thursday, he backed off his assertion that pork-barrel spending led to last year's deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Josh is completely correct in saying that this is a major problem for McCain, one that belies the notion that Iraq won't be the biggest issue this election cycle or even one of the two or three top ones. Watching the franticness of McCain himself, his campaign and the Republican Party as a whole in trying to downplay McCain's comments on Iraq indeed speaks to the fact that this is a serious problem for McCain and his party, one that could sink his hopes and those of the GOP in November. The data backs this up.

Results from a new national study among 629 self-reported Democrats, Republicans and independent voters showed that after viewing a new DNC ad attacking Senator McCain, independent voters' favorability ratings of the senator decreased by 10% points.

The study was conducted by HCD Research on April 29, 2008, to obtain Americans' perceptions of a new DNC ad entitled "100" that attacks Senator John McCain. The ad features a clip from a January 3, 2008 town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire in which Senator McCain responded with his hundred year remark to a comment from an audience member who mentioned last year's White House statement about the U.S. having a possible 50 year military presence in Iraq.

McCain's numbers in hypothetical head-to-head matchups against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might not look bad right now, but the concerns from the right side of the aisle tell a much different story. While McCain can now enjoy inflated numbers, rallying his base without having to worry about running against one named challenger, the fact that he hasn't been able to take a real lead during this period -- a period in which his out-of-touch position on Iraq has come to the fore -- doesn't augur particularly well for his hopes in the long run.