Yes, this sure has become apolitical quickly, hasn't it?

Seems designed to grab the headlines and reclaim some forced coverage.

Stunt.

Hard to combat, though, without looking wimpy.

So, again: stunt. Gamesmanship.

Trying to look like George Patton of the economy.

Obama's speaking now...

I'm sure the Obama camp will say that they left a message and the McCain camp will say that they never got the message, which just reinforce the meme that McCain doesn't know how to use present day technology.

Greg:

Can you ask them why his attendance at the Clinton Global Initiative is more important than attending the firs presidential debate? Just curious....

What actually happened is that McCain owns the bailout issue, the news cycle and the fate of the debate.

Obama is marginalized.

The rest is just white noise.

CNN Take:

A McCain senior adviser said that Obama called McCain early Wednesday morning to asking a joint statement of "shared principles and conditions" for the bailout proposal.

An Obama campaign source confirmed the call and said that McCain returned his call six hours later, and accepted the concept and suggested the two of them return to Washington to join the negotiations. The source says that Obama told him that he would do that only if negotiators saw it as useful.

According to the Obama source, soon after they ended the call, McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington.

Obama says he wants the debates to go on... "Citizens deserve to hear about this from the people who will be responsible in 40 days... president should be able to do more than two things at once."

Your move, McGoo...

The BO surge in the pools its clear, JM is trying to stem the bleeding. This is nothing but a scam and as i am watching BO give him press conference i get the sense that everyone thinks it is as well.

I just heard Obama say something to the effect of "There's no reason to act like we can only do one thing at a time. Presidents have to do more than one thing at a time."

Perfect!

Bo did it again ...ball back in McPOS's court

What is McCain going to do now? Is he going to let BO have an hour and 30 minutes on TV all by himself. The folks at Ole Miss say they are continuing with their preparations for a debate.

This has backfire written all over it for McCain.

Translation: "My entire campaign staff needs to go to DC to get themselves a piece of the pie. This happened earlier than expected, and I must defer to the urgent priorities of my staff."

Gramps had to suspend his campaign. His lobbyist staff were all running out of the door to get back to DC to advocate why their client's need access to the taxpayer backed trough.

In the absence of contrary information, always assume McCain is being a dick.

This, I suspect, is the full chronology:

1. Republicans, including McCain, hoped that Congressional Democrats would get stampeded and pass a bailout where plenty of the GOPers would have "principled" objections to the details and vote against it. Their banker buddies would get their bailout, and these "true conservatives" would run against the Dems as big spenders and distance themselves from the Bush Administration's.

2. Congressional Dems made it clear they weren't going to pass anything without major support from Republicans in general and McCain in particular.

3. McCain decries this yesterday as "playing politics" with the economy.

4. Nobody buys it.

5. Obama reaches out to McCain both to actually produce a solution and to use jiu-jitsu on McCain's constant claims of bipartisanship to prevent McCain from screwing him later for his efforts to actually produce a solution.

6. McCain flushes good-faith negotiations down the toilet and rushes to go public so he can claim the credit, and tries to up the ante by "suspending his campaign" and thinking he can make Obama look bad if he doesn't do likewise and agree to postpone the debate.

7. Who knows? My prediction is that McCain's gambit will again fall flat; hopefully by the Obama campaign pointing out that presidential campaigns (including debates) have continued through world wars before, that the presidential campaign is an important process of democracy, not some cheap political sideshow, and that presidents need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Let me see.

Obama/Biden surges to 6 - 9 point lead over McBush/McBarbie in most recent polls.

The lead is ~13 points for who is better to deal with the economy.

What does McBush/McBarbie do?

Let's try a thinly-veiled, political hack approach.

McBush will appear to be a great leader if he suspends his moribund campaign. At the same time he can avoid a debate where he is likely to get thrashed.

So, what are our analogues on the right saying about this? Over on RedState they are desperately trying to spin this as a demonstration of heroic McCain vs venal Obama, while over at over at the NRO they are already lamenting the fact that they know that the spin on this will not be good for McCain.

Mr. Marshall says that McCain's action is a "political stunt dressed up as vainglorious self-sacrifice."

In fact, Mr. Marshall has things all mixed up. McCain's action is a vainglorious political stunt dressed up as noble self-sacrifice.

I know it's tempting to use a word like "vainglorious." But you have to remember what it actually means.

In Palin-paralance, McCain blinked.

I get the feeling that McCain wants Obama to continue his campaign. This seems to me like a set up to use the "Country First" slogan on him.

The bill is moving and not nearly dead both sides of the house says this as does the administration. Mccain rolled the dice and got snake eyes. He desperately wanted to be the lead on this and have Obama jump on his bandwagon. Didnt happen. He wanted the bill to be dead so he could ride in on the hero horse. Wont happen. He wanted a gamechanger and reached into the bag for desperation and it has backfire written all over it.

Mccain just got Marc Anthonied

The wingnutz would say "good move" no matter what McSame did. They're hoping that the public is stupid. these tactics used to work in the era of 3 networks only, but not in the 24/7 cable-Internet news cycle.
The American public has been gamed by the Rovians so much that they won't buy this latest bullshit "wolf" cry.

That was the most cool, subtle, presidential and effective way to tell McCain: "Back off, bitch!".

He killed it, period.

Today, he probably won the election.

McCain pulled a hell of a stunt (backstabbing included) and he went too far. Jumping the shark, nuking the fridge, whatever. He did it today.

And Obama show the world today what real leadership means: Don't act recklessly, think before doing something, understand that actions have consequences, see things in the long term.

The U.S. presidency is one of the toughest jobs on earth. When you're president, you have to deal with several crisis at the same time. You can't just call off the problems to solve them one at the time. The real world doesn't work like that.

McCain's ads always ask at the end if Barack Obama is ready to lead. Today, he proved that he's more than ready, willing and able to do so.

Also, today John McCain has proved that he's not ready and that in fact, if he's elected to the Oval Office, is nothing more a big liability that America can't afford on this difficult times.

As an attorney and a student and practitioner of weasel talk, I submit that the following excerpt from the McCain spokesman's statement is weasel talk:

The topic of Senator Obama's call to Senator McCain was never discussed.

Why the wierd passive voice. "Not discussed by whom." That sentence, lame as it was, was fretted over.

I suspect when the dust clears it will be very clear that the McSamies knew Obama was going to propose a bipartisan effort to aid the bailout.

O boy Mccain is in trouble Fox news is carrying Obama's water on this...man weird day

This is seriously the lamest campaign tactic I have ever seen.