It is truly amazing how quickly John McCain’s campaign has descended into absolute absurdity. Candidates often must live with being the targets of parody — think of the best of Saturday Night Live, of Dan Ackroyd’s Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford, the various Reagan’s and Dana Carvey’s George HW Bush and Ross Perot. Priceless.
But the joke going around today among political junkies is pretty basic and all revolve around the basic premise offered here by Matt Stoller on Open Left in a headline to a post:
Shutting the Blog Down to Focus on the Economy
Eric Alterman updated his Facebook status with the same kind of joke, saying he “is suspending all Facebook activity to deal with the nation’s economic crisis….”
I’m not sure about anyone else, but this just doesn’t seem like the kind of humor any political candidate would want to generate. As Greg Saunders writes on Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World blog (where I got the neat little campaign decal above), the debate gambit does little to “reinforce his ‘Country First’ slogan” and, instead, “really just makes him look like an old man who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Chris Cillizza, who writes The Fix blog for The Washington Post, offers what is the conventional wisdom on McCain’s decision:
The move is an obvious attempt by McCain and his campaign to paint the Arizona senator as above politics, willing to put aside his campaign for the good of the country.
He maybe right — but consider that he filed this post at 5:15 p.m. Since then, this proposal has been floated:
A McCain aide told Politico Wednesday night that the campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the vice presidential debate, currently scheduled for October 2 in St. Louis.
Under this scenario, the vice presidential debate would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Miss., where the first presidential debate is currently slated to be held.
Jonathan Martin on Politico, after outlining the debate switch as reported by CNN, offers an alternative explanation, more as an aside than anything:
This would also buy Palin some more prep time.
And McCain, as The Nation’s Adam Howard writes, gets a way to make news while possibly avoiding a debate that he was in no way ready for:
McCain must have been thinking, “I have to do something! Something maverick-y!” He has proven to be a master of short term solutions. Whether it’s the surge, drilling to solve the gas price crisis, firing the SEC chairman or picking Sarah Palin–virtually every McCain decision is based on short term goals and satisfaction.
I know, I know, John McCain is a great American hero and incapable of making a decision like this for purely cynical, political reasons–but bear with me on this. It has been something of an open secret all week that McCain hasn’t really been spending all that much time preparing for this Friday’s debate where reportedly Obama’s aides are putting him through the wringer. Could it be that McCain was starting to get cold feet? Not to mention the fact that he and his campaign are under fire right now for his campaign manager Rick Davis’ ties to Fannie Mae. Turns out he was getting paid indirectly by the mortgage giant as recently as last month–a reality McCain recently emphatically denied.
Then again, the McCain campaign has been all about denying reality lately. That way they can say the New York Times, a newspaper that enthusiastically endorsed John McCain during the GOP primaries, is an arm of the Obama campaign, no different than the Huffington Post. McCain appears to be running a dartboard campaign. Just throw whatever you can up there and see what sticks. This move may just work, voters may think McCain has their best interests at heart…but then why did he wait until now to call for bipartisanship? As I write this he’s running ads accusing Obama of being MIA on the bailout debate (even though Obama submitted to a lengthy press conference on the subject just yesterday, while McCain and especially Palin have largely refused to be questioned at length about it.) It doesn’t make sense, but then again, McCain rarely does.
I think David Letterman might agree:
David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator’s decision and suggesting “something doesn’t smell right” about the Senator’s plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.
Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, “When you all up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know.” He repeated that “something smells right now” and he suggested “somebody must have put something in his Metamucil.”
A little later, according to The New York Times, he returned to the McCain cancelation:
His critique reached a high point when he learned that at the very moment Mr. McCain was supposed to be on the couch next to him being interviewed, the senator was at the CBS News center three blocks away in Manhattan, getting ready to be interviewed by the CBS News anchor, Katie Couric.
Mr. Letterman ordered his director to put on a live feed from that location, which showed Mr. McCain getting made up to go on with Ms. Couric. “He doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport,” Mr. Letterman observed.
After listening to some questions from Ms. Couric, Mr. Letterman said, “Hey, John, I’ve got a question: You need a lift to the airport?”
I’m not sure this is the impact that McCain was shooting for.
(As an aside here: A poll by SurveyUSA — yes, they’ve already done a poll on this, found that just one in 10 respondents agree with McCain that the debate should be postponed.)
Hank Kalet 