“Eighty percent of success,” Woody Allen said famously, “is showing up.”

Already, John McCain may be more successful than George W. Bush.

Admittedly, it’s not a high bar.

Last week, McCain spoke to the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. For a major-party nominee for president, that appearance would almost be a given, like endorsing Social Security or appearing at the presidential debates.

Except that the 2004 Republican candidate didn’t show up. In fact, he hadn’t met with NAACP leaders during his first term in the White House (according to the group, he was the first president since Warren Harding not to) and explained he had a “basically nonexistent” relationship with the leaders of the country’s most prominent African-American group.

Last week, in Cincinnati, McCain showed up at the NAACP convention, speaking to a polite crowd in a hall about two-thirds full. You couldn’t say that McCain appeared because he thought he has better prospects with the black vote than Bush did in 2004.

Last time, Bush won an estimated 11 percent of the black vote, a typical number for a GOP presidential candidate. This year, running against the first black major-party nominee for president, McCain trails in a New York Times poll of black voters by a Soviet-election-style 89 percent to 2 percent. That’s optimistic next to a new Quinnipiac poll showing him losing the black vote 94 percent to 1 percent.

In fairness, the Quinnipiac poll had a 2.4 percentage point margin of error, meaning that McCain’s black support could be as high as 3.4 percent. Of course, it could also be as low as minus-1.4 percent.

And it’s hard to see how McCain can make much of a pitch for support from NAACP members. In the three Congresses before this one, he received a steady F from the organization; in this Congress, he just hasn’t been around much.

Last week, he spoke to the group about school vouchers, an issue that polls have shown to have some black support but that didn’t seem to thrill the hall. He didn’t sound like he expected to win many votes, but he made clear why he was there.

“Whether or not I earn your support, I need your good will and counsel,” McCain told the group. “And should I succeed, I’ll need it all the more.”

Asked why the candidate had bothered, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, McCain’s southwest Ohio campaign chairman, explained, “Because it is the right thing to do. Because, if you win, you are the president of the United States, not the president of a certain demographic.”

Because it’s always a good idea to show up.

The Bush administration strategy has been to cater to the 51 percent you absolutely need and ignore the rest. It can get you through elections – narrowly – but then you have to live with the results. When you’re president, there will be times when it’s not helpful to have a “basically nonexistent” relationship with a major part of your constituency.

With Bush, it happened less than a year after his re-election, in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans and he found himself in desperate need of African-Americans to testify to his good intentions.

This may be why, in the summer of 2006, he finally appeared at the NAACP convention, opening with a Bushlike joke about his introducer: “I thought what he was going to say, ‘It’s about time you showed up.’ ”

Actually, it was a little late.

American politics has become increasingly about friends and enemies, about groups that politicians cling to and groups that politicians dismiss into outer darkness. It’s not good for the country, and it’s not promising for the politicians: Every officeholder’s Hurricane Katrina shows up eventually, and he suddenly needs the friends he never bothered to make.

The 2008 campaign has actually been an improvement. McCain has shown up in other places where his electoral prospects are not strong. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have made a point of speaking to evangelical Christian groups, the people who in 2004 were supposed to be the bulwark of the permanent Republican majority.

Appearing before the NAACP, McCain probably didn’t win many votes in November. But he did show that he understood the first principle: 80 percent of success is showing up.

This may be why George Bush’s approval rating is in the 20s.