McCain working on list of VP candidates

PENSACOLA, Florida (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Wednesday he has begun a list of potential vice presidential running mates -- a decision he quipped was especially big "given my age."

McCain, 71, said his search is in the "embryonic stage" but that he has a list of about 20 names and has talked to a couple of people about leading his vice presidential search team.

He would like to have his running mate set before the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in early September that will nominate McCain as the party's choice to face either Democrat Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the November election.

"I'd like to get it done as early as possible," McCain said.

McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that he wanted a smooth process to avoid the kinds of problems associated with the roll-out of Republican George H.W. Bush's running mate in 1988, Dan Quayle.

Quayle was told he was Bush's pick just shortly before his name was announced and was not prepared for questions such as whether he had used family connections to get into the Indiana National Guard and avoid the Vietnam War.

McCain joked to radio talk show host Don Imus that his pick of a potential presidential backup carried extra interest. "I'm aware of the enhanced importance of this issue given my age," he quipped.

The Arizona senator would be the oldest first-term U.S. president if elected.

'EVERY NAME IMAGINABLE'

A host of Republican politicians have been mentioned as running-mate possibilities. "It's every name imaginable," he told reporters.

McCain's sentimental tour this week took him on Wednesday to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, from which he graduated in 1958 fifth from the bottom of his class, and to Florida, where he learned to fly fighter jets.

At Pensacola Junior College, McCain said he was a self-indulgent pilot-in-training who "once knocked down power lines in southern Spain, flying too low," before a serious threat in 1962 helped give him maturity.

McCain was a flier aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise when it was deployed off the Cuban coast during the 1962 missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to blows over the Soviets' placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from U.S. shores.

"For about five days, we believed we were going into action. We had never been in combat before, and despite the global confrontation a strike on Cuba portended, we were prepared and anxious to fly our first combat mission," McCain said at Pensacola Junior College.

McCain was in Annapolis to review his rambunctious four years prior to training as a fighter pilot and heading to Vietnam, where his plane was shot down in 1967 and he spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.

Standing in front of an empty football stadium as a brisk, chilly wind had U.S. flags behind him flapping, McCain told a small crowd that many Americans had become cynical about government and urged them to take up the cause of public service.

McCain, talking to reporters on his campaign bus, also attacked Democratic candidate Obama, saying his talk of leaving a "strike force" in Iraq left him puzzled because Obama has often talked of a troop withdrawal.

"I know he's inexperienced and I know he's got a lack of knowledge" about national security, McCain said.

Blasted by Democrats for saying the United State might have a 100-year military presence in Iraq, McCain told reporters he had no regrets for making the comment which he said was in the context of lengthy U.S. military presences in Japan and South Korea.

"But I certainly don't regret it because I mean it. I think we will have a presence there the way we have a presence in Kuwait," he said.

He said progress in the Iraq war was such that the United States could stand down from a combat posture "in a relatively short period of time," but would not be more specific.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)