This week, as the political news cycle takes a back seat to the Olympics and most federal campaigns take advantage of the chance to lie low and catch a breath, politics analyst David Schultz and I turn to a couple of emergent themes in the McCain campaign — the growing signs that McCain’s managers are making him less accessible to the press and the public (which I wrote about earlier today, here), and the Christian conservative undertow in his recent round of TV and web advertising.

The campaign has unmistakably shifted gears in the past month since bringing in Karl Rove protege Steve Schmidt, Schultz notes: "Given all the gaffes that he’s made in the last few weeks — not getting borders straight, misspeaking about countries — he’s increasingly using political commercials and highly scripted town hall meetings. The Republicans are significantly protecting the candidate and protecting his image. And it seems to be having positive effects for McCain at the expense of Obama.

"McCain’s older [than in past campaigns], clearly. He’s old, and he’s looking old. He’s been campaigning hard for a while, and probably anyone would be fatigued by running for president. But increasingly I think we’re going to see the whisper campaign about his age and whether he’s up for the job start to get elevated into something beyond whispers. It’s something people are going to start to raise. Clearly it’s happening at the blog level now, and at some point [it will go] further.

"The two areas in which the media have been unwilling to question McCain on are his experience in foreign affairs and the age issue. A few weeks ago when Wesley Clark made the comment that being a prisoner of war for several years doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States, that was an accurate statement from, what, a four- or five-start general? The media went ballistic on that one, as did a lot of bloggers. But that question is starting to come back now, too, because McCain has made several statements about international affairs, and no timetables, and all of this has been eroded by events in the world. And the media started paying more attention to his gaffes.

[The campaign is] retreating so he doesn’t keep making those mistakes. But the age issue becomes a factor at this point, because he’s not a good speaker publicly to start with, and he seems to be stammering a little bit more. I’ve heard a couple of people use the phrase, doesn’t McCain have kind of a "Reagan-esque" look about him, referring to the late Ronald Reagan and to Alzheimer’s. It’s a fascinating question as to when this [issue] cracks through, and I suspect that if McCain continues to hammer away at Obama, then if Obama doesn’t raise the question, his bloggers and his operatives are going to start to respond with commercials that will raise something along the lines of, ‘When the crisis occurs at 3 in the morning, is John McCain even going to be able to get up for it?’

"I think those are going to be real concerns. Polling data is suggesting at this point that while 10-20 percent of the population might not vote for somebody because of their race, there is also 10-15 percent of the population that says age is an issue, and stamina is an issue."

Listen: David Schultz discusses the age issue and McCain’s advertising appeals to the Christian right (17:10)