Thomas Fitzgerald: Pressing the flesh can be a minefield for presidential candidates

Just after dawn one recent Saturday, Rick Perry stood in a field of prairie grass in northwestern Iowa, styling rubber camouflage boots, green nylon pants, and khaki vest with blaze-orange shoulders.

Posing for news cameras, the Republican governor of Texas unclipped his BlackBerry and tossed it to an aide. "Here you go," he said. "Tweet time. Why don't you take a picture and tweet it?"

Perry was hunting pheasant - and engaging in one of those outlandish campaign rituals in which presidential candidates pretend to be regular people (who just so happen to appeal to one crucial constituency or another).

It has been ever thus since at least 1896, when William McKinley's campaign manager arranged to have him photographed with voters.

Except Perry's pandering at the Loess Hunting Preserve outside Merrill, Iowa, seemed more natural than most. By all accounts, he does hunt and is proficient with firearms, and he famously shot a coyote while jogging in Austin. It was menacing his daughter's dog, he said.

"As long as I've got memory, I had something to go hunting with," Perry said.

It was clear that he felt more comfortable than he has been on the debate stage, where at times he has looked more like the prey than the hunter.

At any rate, the proper point was made: Who could imagine the professorial President Obama tramping through the brush to hunt birds? Or Mitt Romney, Perry's chief rival for the GOP nomination, a somewhat formal and awkward man who often is called "stiff" (by his fans).

In his last presidential campaign, Romney got in trouble casting himself as a great outdoorsman. "I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said. Later he said, "I'm not a big-game hunter. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will."

That became one of the punch lines of the 2008 campaign when it turned out Romney had been hunting only a couple of times in his life. He had to backtrack from his macho talk. He seemed to try to convince every audience he was one of them. For instance, he stressed his opposition to abortion rights when speaking to evangelical groups, a reversal from his stance as a Senate candidate and later as governor of Massachusetts.

This time around, Romney has not been as overtly ingratiating, sticking mostly to economic issues on the trail. That plays to his strength as a former businessman and also matches the times; the economy is the dominant issue. Still, his cautious approach has sometimes fed the flip-flopper meme, as when he declined to endorse a law limiting the bargaining rights of public workers in Ohio on Tuesday and said he was "110 percent" behind it a day later.

A lot of recent panderings have centered on hunting and guns, driven by the political power of white exurban swing voters in presidential elections. In the 2008 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, for instance, Hillary Clinton talked of how her Scranton-native father taught her to shoot behind the family's Lake Winola cottage.

Back then, Obama was feeling the heat after he was caught at a private event referring to working-class Keystone State voters as "bitter" people who "cling to their guns and religion." Clinton pummeled him as they campaigned across the state. An exasperated Obama mocked her during a rally in a Steelton, Pa., union hall: "She's talking like she's Annie Oakley."

For his part, Obama went bowling in Altoona, rolling a dismal 37. Notice how he hasn't played much sports in public since? Since he became president, Obama's near-weekly golf games are closed to cameras.

Pandering doesn't always work. Witness Democrat John Kerry, who, in 2004, when "NASCAR Dads" were a sought-after demographic, professed deep interest in auto racing, saying, "Who among us doesn't love NASCAR?"

Then there was the late October day when Sen. Kerry went a-huntin' goose. He emerged from a blind near Youngstown, Ohio, cradling a 12-gauge shotgun, a spot of blood on his hands. The candidate strode down a line of golden cornstalks as reporters and photographers recorded the scene. Perhaps the only flaw? Somebody else was carrying his dead goose.

"I'm too lazy," Kerry joked. He seemed slightly embarrassed at the absurdity.

Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, had a grand time throwing off his security bubble one February day in 1988, with his lead in the New Hampshire primary slipping away.

Bush then ordered coffee at Cuzzin Richie's truck stop in the town of Greenland and jumped into a 29-ton tank truck and drove the 18-wheeler around the block, with Secret Service agents on the running boards.