Say Cheese! But Watch for the Applesauce.

John McCain figured he would have a tough time getting attention last week. The superstar images of Barack Obama's overseas tour were made for TV. So McCain's people set up their own Hollywood shot: the candidate would chopper over the Gulf of Mexico to an oil rig off the Louisiana coast, where, flanked by men and machinery, he would give a speech promoting offshore oil drilling to ease gas prices. "We won't catch Obama on pictures this week," admitted one McCain adviser who asked not to be named talking about strategy. "But we can at least try and stay in the game."

It wasn't meant to be. Less than an hour after announcing the photo op, the campaign abruptly canceled, citing Hurricane Dolly, which was swirling near the Texas coast. Worse, a runaway barge along the Mississippi River had rammed into a 600-foot oil tanker that morning, leaving a 12-mile-long oil slick that blanketed New Orleans in diesel fumes.

The campaign's big photo op of the week turned out to be a visit to a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa.—where McCain was photographed in front of a display of processed cheese. As the candidate roamed through the store, his campaign's lanky cameraman knocked over a shelf of Mott's applesauce. The jars skittered across the floor past the senator's feet. When he paused to take questions from reporters, he was briefly drowned out by an announcement on the store's PA system.

All week, McCain aides had been complaining about what they saw as the media's obsession with the Obama trip. They were also unhappy about the thin attention they were receiving. Even Fox News broke away from live coverage of the senator's town-hall meeting to follow the plight of Lil' Smokey, a black bear cub rescued from the California wildfires.

Yet some McCain advisers privately concede the candidate's troubles are not entirely the media's fault. Since capturing the GOP nomination this spring, McCain's campaign has fought to gain its footing and to find a consistent message that defines why he should be elected. It hasn't helped that McCain has resisted pleas from his aides to cut back on the visually dull town-hall meetings he loves and submit to carefully choreographed events in grander settings, where the pictures tell the story. The senator has a deep distaste for the artifice of modern media-driven campaigns—all this business about standing in precisely this spot and reading precisely this line off a teleprompter exactly the same way a dozen times a day.

His staff can spend weeks organizing an elaborate campaign appearance, only to have McCain ignore his stage directions. A stop at a home-heating-oil plant in New Hampshire last week went awry when McCain stood in the wrong place against staff advice and took questions in front of a bright white oil truck. The result: harsh, washed-out pictures of the candidate. At a press conference earlier this month, McCain aides ordered reporters not to turn to look at the senator as he walked to the microphones, fearing he would catch sight of a familiar face and start talking before he reached the photogenic backdrop.