Apparently, I am not the only one who see's John McCain's bogus "suspend my campaign" and delay the debate charade for what it is. As I posted last night, this is ALL about avoiding facing the press and tough questioning and finding a reason to NOT have Sarah Palin debate Joe Biden who will be able to demonstrate his fitness for the VP slot and at the same time show Palin to be a mindless pagent girl who is unfit to govern anything larger than a small village. What is truly disturbing about McCain's disingenuousness is that he and his advsors apparently believe all Americans are cretins. I hope voters recognize how badly they have been insulted. Here are some highlights from Meyerson's Washington Post column:*
Slipping in the polls? Concerned that Americans may be paying more attention to the declining economy -- and even supporting economic regulation again -- than to your own stellar leadership abilities? What's a Republican presidential nominee to do?
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If you're named John McCain, the answer became apparent yesterday afternoon -- make the solution to the economic crisis all about you. Suspend your campaign. Pull out of tomorrow's debate -- a trivial exercise merely allowing Americans to judge the two candidates side by side. Change the terms of the nation's economic discussion from the course we should take, and the defects of the laissez-faire model that got us here, to the indispensability of John McCain, leader of leaders.
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Yesterday's Post-ABC News Poll showed Barack Obama opening a nine-point lead over McCain, chiefly because of the economic anxiety flooding the nation and the belief of most Americans that Obama is more in touch with economic realities than McCain is and has a better sense of how to navigate both the current crisis and America's long-term economic challenges. But the McCain plan for victory this November never counted on Americans picking McCain on the basis of the issues.
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As his strategists saw it, they had to confine the discussion to a comparison of the character of the two candidates. Alas for McCain, reality intruded over the past week, distracting the public from McCain's stellar attributes as a decisive leader with news of an impending economic collapse. So the task for his managers has been to diminish this new story to just one chapter in the ongoing saga of John McCain, the man who rides to the rescue.
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Can McCain pull this off -- persuading the public to forget how he and his fellow Reagan Republicans changed the nation's economic rules in ways that allowed Wall Street to run amok, and refocusing its attention on his decisiveness at this moment of crisis? I doubt it.
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For one thing, America may be a republic of amnesiacs, but deep in some seldom-used brain lobe, it does recall that its two political parties have differed on questions of regulation and stimulating the economy, a comparison that does not now work in Republicans' favor. For another, presidential debates aren't distractions from the business of the nation.
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McCain's ploy was transparent. To counter the public's preference for Obama's economics over his own, he would get both of them in a room and emerge proclaiming that they had reached agreement, that they had no differences. In fact, they have very real differences.
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Comparisons such as these are odious, however, to McCain's prospects. He cannot win on the strength of his positions. He can only win on the strength of his character. Problem is, McCain's character, as we have seen in his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, is heavy on decisiveness and weak on judgment. In this, despite his campaign's protestations, a McCain presidency would be very much an extension of George W. Bush's. . . . . Obama, Lord knows, has his flaws, but he does not seem to believe that the nation's crises are primarily about him.
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