McCain in trouble...

With the latest polls showing Barack Obama leading John McCain by nine points, the McCain camp is clearly scrambling to pull itself back together after enduring a week of stunning mishaps and misstatements. Now, it appears, John McCain is moving to suspend his campaign and postpone the first presidential debate scheduled for this Friday. Ostensibly the reason is that McCain wants to get back to Washington to try and help steer the U.S. through this crisis and ensure the passage of the Wall Street bailout package that is suffering a whithering battering from all sides, and which the Fed insists is vital to avert a wide scale economic catastrophe. More likely, I'd say, the McCain camp doesn't want to go into a debate that is meant to focus on National Security, McCain's strong suit, with the rest of the nation pulling its hair out over the economy. There's no surer way for McCain to appear out of touch than for him to go up on stage and badger Barack Obama about his skepticism over the Iraq surge while the rest of the country is stocking up on canned goods, bottled water, ammunition and stuffing its mattresses full of Euros. Furthermore, all Obama has to do to respond to McCain's charges is to note that we could easily have covered the Wall Street bailout if we'd done the sensible thing and stayed out of Iraq. Now we're essentially paying for it twice. Indeed, if this administration hadn't been so sidetracked by Iraq, perhaps it might have paid more attention to the markets and averted this disaster before it became inevitable. Case closed. Obama wins the debate and McCain's most potent weapon fizzles like a dud.

These are surely tough times for the McCain camp.