Picture this: A straight-shooting war hero is picked by the GOP as its nominee. John McCain? No, Bob Dole in 1996. That didn’t work out too well.

Dole lost after a campaign vexed by senior moments such as when he fell off a stage, or referred to the Los Angeles Dodgers as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

All along, Bill Clinton showed deference to Dole, heralding his challenger’s “half century of service” to the country and talking about his heroism.

It was an effective tactic designed to honor, and at the same time remind the electorate just how behind the times and out of touch the man was.

Not surprisingly, it’s pretty much exactly how Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama begin a lot of their references to John McCain these days.

John McCain brings back memories of Bob Dole.

“The guy’s a war hero,” Barack Obama says frequently, transitioning quickly to the “fierce urgency of now,” leaving McCain, a quarter-century his senior, in the dust.

The Republican nominee-to-be, 71, isn’t helping is own cause.

A new Democratic campaign video shows John McCain at a press conference in Iraq, veering off-message and talking about a non-existent al Qaeda presence in Iraq, only to be saved by friend and colleague, Sen. Joe Lieberman.

As John McCain’s appearance on The Late Show last week showed us, he’s been in good spirits regarding the age question for the most part, joking about being “older than dirt” and having “more scars than Frankenstein.”

In fairness to McCain, he’s a lot more lucid and aware of what’s going on than Bob Dole was 12 years ago. The Dodgers’ last season in Brooklyn was 1957.

Ultimately, though, it will be a platform nearly identical to the failed policies of Bush and our hunger for something better that will be his undoing.