Just now breaking – John McCain is “suspending his campaign” and wants the debate postponed due to the economic crisis.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out. McCain says he wants both campaigns suspended until this “crisis is resolved”. Of course we don’t know when that will be. Could this be a lead up to trying to suspend the election?

It really seems rather “convenient” for McCain to do this on a day that a national poll finds him down by 9 points and more news comes out about his embattled campaign manager. It really sounds like a political game McCain is trying to play. To me it sounds like McCain is saying the Senate and Congress are too incompetent to handle this without him or Obama there. Listening to Rham Emanuel, it seems like there is a consensus on that view also.

UPDATE:

David Kurtz points out that the networks aired McCain addressing this and that it was pre-recorded. It sounds like he was playing a timing game on this, which makes it sound far more political.

Think Progress also points out that just yesterday, when McCain was asked about the bailout plan, he said he hadn’t had time to read it. The plan is only 3 pages and McCain couldn’t read it? Yeah – McCain don’t care about the economy, he only cares about winning. I really hope the Obama campaign calls his bluff on this. Perhaps something along this line:

I feel that as Commander in Chief an individual should have the ability to multi-task. I will cancel my campaign events for the rest of the week, however the American people need answers on what the future holds and those questions can be answered in a debate between the two of us. Therefor I want to see the debate go on, yet it should not focus more on the economy.

That would be about perfect.

UPDATE #2:

Here is a statement from the Obama campaign about this:

At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama’s call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details.

See what happened there? Obama wanted to multi-task (something any President should be able to do). McCain said no – he can’t focus on more than one issue at a time. This seems to be catching on. MSNBC was just talking about the lack of multi-tasking by McCain and Aravosis has a good little post about it.

UPDATE #3:

A bunch of McCain surrogates taking to the airwaves on the same message; “This is John McCain showing he puts country first”. So much for suspending his campaign.