A couple of weeks ago, the Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported that a key aspect of John McCain’s general-election strategy is to “drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush.”

Reuters reports today that we’re starting to get a sense of what this strategy looks like in practice.

Slowly but surely, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is putting some distance between himself and unpopular President George W. Bush.

This week it was the ill-timed “Mission Accomplished” banner that the White House hung behind Bush five years ago when Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq.

“I thought it was wrong at the time,” McCain said in Cleveland on Thursday, proceeding to criticize Vice President Dick Cheney’s various comments over the years that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” with “a few dead-enders” all that was left.

Last week, McCain surprised some in the White House by declaring Bush’s leadership “disgraceful” during the crisis over the 2005 Katrina hurricane that walloped New Orleans. “Never again,” McCain declared.

The motivation is pretty obvious; Bush is, after all, “the most unpopular president in modern American history.”

But in the end, McCain and his campaign are badly missing the point.