Suspending campaign = best evidence so far that McCain is too rash for the presidency
September 25th, 2008I’ve seen a number of folks make comments along the lines of, “What does McCain mean by suspending his campaign? He still had an interview on CBS, is speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative, and met with Lady Lynn de Rothschild yesterday… what parts of his campaign are suspended?”
Fair point, but it misses what’s really indicated by this apparent inconsistency: it’s clear that McCain first seriously considered and then decided on this course of action within a maximum of 7 hours. My proof assumes that the McCain campaign operates in a logically coherent manner respecting some self-evident rules of running a campaign, which might be overgenerous. First, the relevant timeline:
- McCain releases two web ads unrelated to the economy yesterday (picture from JohnMcCain.com at 8:34AM 9/25):
- McCain’s campaign held a conference call to discuss an ABC News poll at 10:30AM yesterday.
- McCain met with Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild sometime after 8:30AM yesterday.
- McCain proposed the campaign suspension to Obama at 2:30PM yesterday.
- McCain announces campaign suspension at 5:30PM yesterday.
Under the assumption that McCain’s campaign is not completely broken, it should be a rule that, when considering totally suspending your campaign on the basis of finishing a bill to forestall economic disaster, you would avoid events unrelated to said economic meltdown. There are three documented activities yesterday by McCain, McCain’s ad team, and McCain’s polling/press staff above that are completely unrelated to the Wall St. bailout.
Based on these observations, it’s clear that neither McCain nor his press/polling/advertising operations were seriously considering the prospect of a campaign suspension until after 10:30AM yesterday. This means that, in the absence of any earth shaking developments in the financial markets, McCain started considering and then decided on this path within just a few hours. I understand that McCain prides himself on being decisive, but there’s a better word for his actions yesterday: rash.
It’s simply mind-blowing to think that our next President could be so totally unprepared in a situation that’d been developing for weeks at least (Obama’s been consistent on this for years, but let’s ignore that for now). The President needs contingency plans to be ready to spring into action for a billion different things, and the McCain campaign’s off-the-wall, incoherent response here is really startling. McCain was clearly operating through the first half of yesterday under the assumption that he was campaigning as usual and then completely reversed course with zero intervening events of note. If McCain were President today and had given the speech that George Bush gave last night, there’d be an odds on chance that he’d show up on TV tonight and announced TVA 2.0 to drag us out of depression, or announce an end to the bailout and the beginning of survival of the fittest on Wall St. — who knows?