McCain….Wait…Wait…Timeout…Timeout; Media reaction
John McCain has asked to call off the debate on Friday because he feels that his immediate presence is needed in Washington DC. McCain has not been to work since April but now he feels that he should miss the debate to address the financial situation. As scary as the idea, in and of itself, of McCain being the person handling the economic turmoil that our financial industry finds itself in, McCain makes this decision at a time when we the voters need to hear his plan for getting us out of this mess. Attempting to postpone the debate makes him appear unprepared, desperate, and unable to handle more than one thing at a time. Hey wait…turns out that McCain isn’t prepared. Link
The debate on Friday was to focus on Mr. McCain’s perceived strength, foreign policy. Mr. McCain had not planned to devote large blocks of time to debate practice as did Mr. Obama, who was holing up with a tight circle of advisers at a hotel in Clearwater, Fla., on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to prepare. Mr. McCain had a preparatory session on Wednesday afternoon at the Morgan Library in Manhattan, but advisers said it had been interrupted by his decision, announced immediately afterward, to suspend his campaign
For the record, though McCain claims that his suggestion is an effort to rise above politics, his decision to delay the debate could not be more political. The polls came out yesterday showing Sen. Obama with a growing lead and McCain and his campaign panicked. Obama is within four points of McCain in West Virginia!!!!!! West Virginia is solid red country!!! They realized that Sen. Obama has the wind at his back and the McCain campaign are trying to turn off the fan with a political stunt because they can’t do so with a good economic plan (they don’t have one). Not only does McCain think that the current situation warrants a delay of his debate but warrants a canceling of the vice presidential debate. Seriously????? Do they really think that the American people are going to put Palin in the White House without hearing her debate and speak in a non-McCain staged environment. McCain does not sit on any of the relevant committees that are currently in deep negotiations. Several Congressmen have come out and said that McCain’s presence would actually hurt the process. The crisis began a week ago..you remember……when McCain said that “the fundamentals of our economy is strong.” Why didn’t McCain cancel the debate at that time? McCain appears frantic and erratic……he does not appear to be the steady leader we expect of a future President. If we had a debate in 1934 during D-Day we think that McCain can make his way down to Ole Miss without the the nation falling into a vortex. You need to be able to multitask as the leader of the free world. What’s next…..should we suspend the election until McCain catches up? The main stream media has rejected McCain’s latest ploy as pure politics.
It was stated best in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:
Last we checked, the President of the United States was still George W. Bush, the Secretary of the Treasury was still Henry Paulson, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was still Ben Bernanke, and Congress still had 533 members not running for President who are at least nominally competent to debate and pass legislation.
So count us as mystified by Senator John McCain’s decision yesterday to suspend his campaign and call for a postponement in Friday’s first Presidential debate so that he and Barack Obama can work out a consensus bill to stabilize the financial system. This is supposed to be evidence of leadership?
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…….McCain’s ploy was transparent.
Democrats accused Mr. McCain of pulling a stunt to halt a slide in the polls. They also tweaked him for declaring the economic situation so dire it requires suspension of his campaign, a week after he declared the fundamentals of the economy are sound.
Some independent analysts agreed. “It is a stunt. It is a ploy,” said David S. Birdsell, dean of the school of public affairs at Baruch College in New York, an expert on presidential debates.
He called it a “very high-risk strategy” for Mr. McCain to take responsibility for brokering a solution to the economic crisis. “He’s not president yet,” Dr. Birdsell said, adding that pulling out of a debate is unprecedented. “That notion that we take one of the most sacred obligations and rituals of American politics and suspend it because there’s an urgent national question is highly problematic.”
If Winston Churchill could leave London in December 1941 and travel to America to address a joint session of Congress even as British troops in the Far East were reeling under Japanese attacks, somehow we think John McCain can make his way down to Oxford, Miss., for a debate Friday evening without imperiling the future of America. In this case, Barack Obama is right.
We don’t know if Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama will do any good back in Washington. But Mr. McCain’s idea of postponing the Friday night debate was another wild gesture from a candidate entirely too prone to them. The nation needs to hear Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain debate this crisis and demonstrate who is ready to lead.
