Further thoughts on a strange day indeed
By (1) Is McCain sick? I agree with Aimai that it seems unlikely, given his schedule — he took a meeting with Lynn Whatshername de Rothschild this morning and did an interview with Katie Couric this afternoon, plus his excuse is that he’s got to be in Washington for the bailout negotiations.
(2) The more I think about it, the weirder the cancel the debate gambit gets. You can’t just pull out with less than 48 hours warning from 90 minutes of prime time on all networks and cable news channels — even our lapdog media will get upset about having their travel plans and story schedules screwed with for transparently tactical reasons like that.
(3) This story might have some explanatory value. If things aren’t moving forward on the legislative front, McCain’s gambit might be, I tried to stop politics as usual and broker a bipartisan deal, Obama put politics before country, and look at how bad the economy is now (this is looking seven weeks down the road). In other words the calculation might be that this is the only way to turn the economic turmoil in his favor — not by getting a Wall Street bailout passed and then pinning it on the Democrats, but by turning a refusal to be stampeded into a giant taxpayer giveaway into the supposed cause of whatever bad economic news breaks in the next 40 days. Or maybe he’s just losing it.
(4) Now his people are saying that if there isn’t a bailout bill passed by Friday he’ll only participate in the debate by webcast. This was just on MSNBC. It’s all a plot to avoid HDTV!